Author: Steven Shaviro

The Shop on Main Street (1965), directed by Jan Kadar and Elmar Klos (but the film seems to be basically the work of Kadar) is often listed among the films of the Czech New Wave. But this is a bit misleading, and not just because the film is Slovak rather than Czech. Kadar and Klos were nearly a generation older than the New Wave directors, and had been making films all through the 1950s. (I haven’t seen any of this earlier work; none of it seems to be available in the US. Although online accounts credit at least one of their Fifties films as being mildly dissident, they would have had to conform to the censorship pressures then in place). Kadar and Klos undoubtedly benefited from the cultural liberalization of the early 1960s; but their filmmaking style remains more traditional, or classical, than that of the New Wave directors. Also, The Shop on Main Street deals with fascist Slovakia during World War II. (Rather than being directly occupied by the Nazis, Slovakia was placed under the homegrown Fascist regime of Jozef Tiso). Because it is thus set in the pre-Communist era, the film doesn’t challenge the Party line, or the official view of history, in any way (as far as I can tell); it was spared the political difficulties faced by many of the New Wave films. (It also won the US Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1965, as the more innovative Closely Watched Trains did two years later. For Hollywood, as much as for the Communist governments of Eastern Europe before 1989, the War and the Holocaust are ‘safer’ subjects than any more recent historical or political engagement).

I don’t mean for these comments to have a snarky tone; I am just trying to place the film. The Shop on Main Street is a powerful and affecting movie, and one that compares favorably with certain more recent cinematic treatments, from East or West, of World War II and the Holocaust. The film is set in 1942, in a small town in rural Slovakia, during the time of the deportation of the Jews to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. (According to Wikipedia, Jews were deported from Slovakia from March 1942 until October 1942, at which time the Slovaks rejected German pressure to deport anyone more. Some more Jews were deported two years later, after Nazi troops occupied Slovakia in 1944. See the article here and the discussion here).

The protagonist Tono (Jozef Kroner) is an amiable and good-hearted everyman figure. He’s a carpenter. His closest emotional tie seems to be to his dog. He is continually being browbeaten and nagged at by his wife; he is also bullied by the wife’s sister’s husband, who is the local Fascist leader. Liike most of the other townspeople we meet in the course of the film, he doesn’t much like the Fascists, but also, prudently, doesn’t do anything overtly to oppose them. The film entirely downplays the issue of any sort of collaboration by the general Slovak population with the local Fascists and with the Nazis; though it also downplays any sort of active resistance or partisan activity, such as led to the Slovak National Uprising in 1944. Instead, Tono is a man in the middle, with decent impulses but no real understanding of politics beyond the sphere of his own personal life.

The Fascist brother-in-law appoints Tono as the “Aryan overseer” — i.e. the new owner, enabled to take over — of a “Jewish business,” a notions shop (selling buttons and such). Tono and his wife imagine that this will make them rich. But it turns out that the shop is owned by a senile old Jewish lady, Mrs. Lautmann (Ida Kaminska), who is poor, cannot make a living from her business, and subsists on charity from the Jewish community. She cannot understand that Tono has been appointed to take over her shop, and thinks instead that he has come to be a shop assistant, and help her. But Tono doesn’t really understand the way things are much better: he has no sense of what is really entailed by his new position, and no overall grasp of the monstrousness of what is going on all around him.

In the course of things, Tono becomes quite fond of Mrs. Lautmann. He finds himself in a strange double role: simultaneously working for the Fascists in their effort to de-Judaize the town, and for the Jewish community, which pays him to take care of Mrs. Lautmann. There are lots of semi-comic scenes — some brilliantly played, and some a bit corny — illustrating the foibies of the townspeople, and the growth of the relationship betwen Tono and Mrs. Lautmann.

Eventually, things come to a head, as the Fascists order the deportation of all the town’s Jews (to Auschwitz, we presume, though the Jews themselves are just told that they will be put to work). Tono, once again, doesn’t really understand what this means. He is torn between at leat three contradictory impulses: 1)a desire to save Mrs. Lautmann, perhaps by hiding her, 2)a fatalistic feeling that it doesn’t really matter, that there is nothing one can do anyway, and that the deportation won’t be all that bad, and 3)a fear that if he helps Mrs. Lautmann, or even just fails to turn her over to the authorities, he will be beaten, tortured, and imprisoned as a “Jew-lover,” as has already happened to another Christian character earlier in the film.

The most brilliant thing in the film is a long sequence near the end, where Tono seems to hold all these three positions nearly simultaneously. He’s in the shop, looking out at the central square where the Jews (all of them in the town, except for Mrs. Lautmann) are being assembled and taken away. As Tono, in his confusion and despair, gets drunker and drunker, he wildly fluctuates from one attitude to the next, at one moment trying to push the bewildered Mrs. Lautmann out into the square, at the next, locking her into a closet so she will not be found. It’s essentially just Jozef Kroner as Tono and the camera; and Tono gives an astonishing bravura performance, a display of hysteria that works powerfully not in spite of, but precisely because of, the fact that we are aware throughout of the actor behind the character, of the way in which this extended outburst is being performed or enacted.

The only other film performance to which I can compare Kroner’s tour de force is James Stewart’s filibuster in the US Senate at the end of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Both of these performances are brilliant displays of actorly hysteria; both display a bodily intelligence on the part of the actor which exceeds the capacities of the character, but thereby manifests the personal and social) forces that inhabit that character. The difference, of course, is that, in Capra’s film, Stewart’s character’s basic goodness shines through, and good triumphs over evil; while in Kadar’s film, Kroner’s character is ultimately impotent. For all of Kroner’s performative range, and rage, Tono can do nothing against the horrors of history, which he is never able to grasp or comprehend. The film ends with his suicide, after Mrs. Lautmann’s death. The final scene, though, is a nostalgic fantasy: we see Tono and Mrs. Lautmann, dressed in the finery of an earlier (pre-War and pre-Fascist) age, stroll peacefully together through the streets, the hazy, blurry lighting indicating clearly that such an ending is entirely wishful and counterfactual.

Cinematic depictions of the Holocaust are problematic, for two logically opposed, yet both entirely cogent, reasons. On the one hand, the horror of the event is banalized by any effort to represent it, which means to make it commensurate with other events. Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah is the only film I know of that properly directs our attention to the unrepresentability of the Holocaust as its subject matter. On the other hand, and at the same time, the Holocaust gets bandied about, precisely in its excess and incommensurability, as a token of high seriousness and good faith, and as a weapon to silence other concerns and other discourses. Holocaust films win Oscars, precisely because the subject matter itself is used to deflect any questions about aesthetic value and artistic integrity. Think Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, or even The Pianist. In fact, it strikes me that Spielberg exhibits both of these tendencies simultaneously; at the same time that Schindler’s List relentlessly and aggressively banalized the Holocaust — is there any more egregious scene in all of Hollywood filmmaking than the one where the Jews, having been shipped to Auschwitz, are sent into an ominous-looking building to take showers, only for us (the viewers) to discover that these are not gas chambers… but actual showers? — the film also claims a moral authority from its subject matter, that preempts all criticism in advance. The result is that Schindler’s List turns the Holocaust into a redemptive fable. To my mind, this is beyond all bounds of basic human decency. I don’t find it indecent or offensive or even shocking when Mel Brooks turns Nazism into a subject for crass comedy; I am not offended by the Nazi s&m chic of films like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter; but Spielberg’s turning the Holocaust into an allegory of redemption is perhaps the one thing that I do find utterly offensive without appeal (sort of what the Christians call the one unpardonable sin, the “sin against the Holy Spirit”).

In this respect, I think that Jan Kadar comes across, some 28 years before Schindler’s List, as the anti-Spielberg. Tono is arguably as decent a figure as Schindler, but without the latter’s superhuman powers. His good heart and good intentions are simply not enough, when arrayed against the monstrous forces of Fascism and Nazism. (The same could apply to Stalinism, or Maoism, or American slavery, or the many other horrors of the last several hundred years). The Shop on Main Street reminds us — and this is a reminder that Americans seem to need, more than Europeans — that a good conscience, and a basic human decency, are not enough to save us. Human beings indeed “make their own history, but –” as Marx goes on to say, “they do not make it just as they please.”

Jaromil Jires’ The Joke (1968) was released in the heady days of the Prague Spring, and immediately banned after the Soviet invasion of August 1968. The film is based upon a novel of the same title by Milan Kundera, and Kundera collaborated with Jires on the screenplay. Unfortunately I have not read the novel, but the film is consistent in theme, incident, and tone with other works by Kundera.

The Joke is set in the mid-1960s, with flashbacks to the early days of Communist rule, in the Stalinist early 1950s. The protagonist and narrator, Ludvik (Josef Somr), is an embittered and cynical man. In the past presented to us in flashbacks, he gets expelled from college and the Party, in 1951 or so, as the result of a (somewhat nasty) postcard he sends his girlfriend as a joke. He is frustrated by the way she puts her duty to the Party ahead of his desire to sleep with her. She is presented, in Ludvik’s recollections, as pretty, and also as quite naive, in her (Party-mandated) cheerfulness and enthusiasm and historical optimism. All this is what Ludvik ridicules in his joke-postcard. But she turns over the postcard to the authorities, who deeme it politically incorrect. Ludvik’s life is derailed by the incident. He loses a decade of his life to the army, to jail, and to work in the mines. It appears that finally he has been rehabilitated; this process is not narrated in the film, but in the film’s present he is some sort of researcher. (The film makes no comment about those who, despite the supposed classlessness of Communist society, never got the opportunity to go to college in the first place, and thus spent their entire lives in the mines or factories).

Now, in the present time of the film, Ludvik seeks revenge upon Pavel (Ludek Munzar), the former friend who led the tribunal that expelled him. Having met Pavel’s wife Helena (Jana Ditetova), Ludvik determines to seduce her, as a way of getting back at Pavel. He tells us, in his voiceover narration, that he has hated Helena from the moment he meets her, because she is Pavel’s wife; but that this hatred leads to an obsession that is not very different from love. Ludvik’s scheme succeeds, but it doesn’t have the consequences he had hoped for. After Helena sleeps with Ludvik, she reveals to him that Pavel won’t care, because they have been separated for a number of years. Therefore, she says, she is free to get involved with Ludvik. We see (though Helena doesn’t) the look of revulsion on Ludvik’s face when she tells him this. The fallout from the incident is ugly for both Ludvik and Helena.

Even though the film’s criticism of the Party is confined to the Stalinist past (the period before Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of the crimes and excesses of Stalin), it’s not surprising that the authorities after 1968 not only banned the film, but literally it excised from Jires’ filmography. For the film endorses Ludvik’s bitterness and negativity at least to the point that it throws into suspicion any suspension of selfhood in the interests of a higher cause, any devotion to higher duties and responsibilities, as well as any sort of (historical or personal) “optimism” of the sort that the Party (or the State) clearly demanded of its members (or its citizens).

Nonetheless, the film’s politics is not straightforwardly “liberal” and individualist by any means. It is rather almost a critique of the liberal conscience, a display of its impotence when faced not just by the horrors of history, but but also by the very passage of time. Ludvik is not a heroic individualist, standing up to the totalitarian pressures of conformity. Rather, he is himself an exacerbated symptom of just that totalitarianism; his struggles against it only perpetuate it in inverted form. Indeed, presenting Ludvik as an anti-socialist hero would itself have meant basically perpetuating the aesthetics of socialist realism, with its portrayals of heroic workers, peasants, and resistance fighters. (This is what, for instance — to take an easy target — Ayn Rand does in her anti-collectivist fiction). Jires and Kundera, however, are much closer to the self-lacerating sensibility of Central- or Eastern-European writers like Kafka and Gombrowicz. They deconstruct the very notion of heroism. Ludvik’s corrosive cynicism cannot avoid redounding back upon himself as well.

Even if this sardonic sensibility can be attributed to Kundera, it is expressed in cinematic form, through the ways that Jires structures the film. The flashbacks to the early 1950s are presented in a remarkable manner — something that I cannot recall having ever seen in any other film. It’s not surprising in itself that we should get an alternation between shots of Ludvik in the present, remembering, and shots of the past that he remembers. But these alternations are presented through the continuity convention of shot and reverse shot, which has a rather disconcerting effect. We don’t see Ludvik himself in the flashback shots; rather, we only see the other people in the scene (his girlfriend, his accusers). The camera is positioned where he stands, and shows us the events entirely from his subjective point of view. Even when he speaks, for instance when he tries to answer the sarcastic accusations of Pavel and the other judges, we only hear a voice off, as he remains entirely off-camera. But it is precisely at the moments when we would expect a cut to a reverse shot of Ludvik in the past, that we get a shot of him in the present moment instead. Sometimes the soundtrack from the flashback even continues over these present-moment “reverse shots.” The backgrounds of the shot and reverse shot obviously do not match, as they are not in the same location, either spatially or temporally. Nonetheless the grammar of continuity editing forces us to feel as if the shots belonged together in the same time and space. The result is a kind of contortion or compression, as if Ludvik were still trapped in his own past, as if time has somehow failed to progress for him, as if the gap separating memory from present-time experience has entirely, and stiflingly, collapsed.

(I can only think of a few other films that make analogously disruptive uses of film temporality, or of the conventions of continuity editing. In Cronenberg’s Spider, the adult protagonist actually appears on screen, as an observer — visible to us but not to the other characters — within the past scenes of his childhood that he is remembering, and in which he also appears as a child. In his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel scrupulously conforms to continuity-editing conventions, and yet subverts them at the same time, by having two actresses alternate in the role of a single character).

The implosion of temporality that I am describing is of course in the first instance psychological. It expresses how Ludvik is trapped in the past. He literally cannot progress. He has been traumatized, and forever marked, by the way that “historical necessity” (as the Party might pompously describe it) has impinged upon, and swallowed up, his private life. But this implosion also has an ontological dimension. Deleuze writes, in his Cinema volumes, about the ways that films is able to present other temporalities than that of the present. In general, the cinematic image overwhelms us with its presence and presentness (especially when the film is shown, as it traditionally has been, on a big screen — things may be different today, as we become more accustomed to small-screen video watching). Nonetheless, Deleuze says, there are certain films that manage to immerse us in the past (or the future?) rather than the present. Deleuze cites the films of Orson Welles and Alain Resnais as examples. (Chris Marker should also be mentioned in this regard). I think that Jires accomplishes something similar, inventing a new and different sort of non-present temporality, in the way that he edits The Joke.

There are far fewer flashbacks in the second half of the film, dealing with the seduction and its consequences. However, what we get here instead is a kind of collapse of narrative. There are lots of shots and scenes involving public celebrations: in counterpoint to the mass political rallies and marches we see in the sequences from the 1950s, here in the present time of the film the people in the small town where most of the action takes place have folklore festivals, dressing in traditional peasant costumes, drinking and dancing and so on. Ludvik feels no connection to all this, but it becomes the inescapable background to his story. The film spreads out in all directions, and ends abruptly, refusing us any sort of emotional resolution or catharsis.

Pavel actually shows up, and greets Ludvik as if there were no bad blood between them. And Ludvik goes along with this charade; he lacks the courage, as well perhaps as the means, to attack Pavel directly. Fifteen years later, Pavel has clearly profited from his loyalty to the Party — or, otherwise expressed, his craven, self-righteous betrayal of Ludvik. He’s had a successful and prosperous university career, goes around the country winning adulation for his lectures, owns and drives a car (still a relative rarity, or privilege of the nomenklatura, in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia), and parades about with a chic, much younger (20-something) girlfriend in tow, who massages his ego as well as servicing his desires. The closest he comes to acknowledging his injustice towards Ludvik (one cannot call it an apology) is when he offhandedly remarks upon how bad things were back then, everyone suffered, terrible things were done, etc.; and how, in contrast, the younger generation is refreshingly free of such attitudes — which is why, he says, he likes younger women so much. All this is delivered in the accents of someone who takes his own privilege so much for granted, that he utterly fails to question it (or even to contextualize it in any way).

Pavel has brought his young girlfriend along, among other reasons, in order to humiliate Helena. He succeeds in this — even as Ludvik has utterly failed to humiliate him. In despair, Helena throws herself upon Ludvik, but he humiliates her as well, scornfully rejecting her, telling her that the earlier sex between them counted for nothing. Helena tries to committ suicide; but the pills she swallows turn out to be a laxative, so she ends up just seated miserably on the toilet, her grand gesture ruined. A young man who is in love with Helena (but whose puppy love she does not take seriously) attacks Ludvik in revenge; Ludvik fights back savagely, wins the fight, and mutters over the prostrate young man “you weren’t the one I wanted to beat up” — and that’s it, the film is over.

My students were most interested in the generational aspect of the film — the difference between the Ludvik, Pavel, and Helena, who are 40-ish and were young in the Stalinist early 1950s, and the young people in the film’s present moment, for whom all that political stuff is merely a fairy tale — they seem to be more materialistically concerned with their own pleasures, and evidently find Ludvik’s bitterness as incomprehensible as they do the loyalty and dedication to the cause that was requisite back then.

On the other hand, my students didn’t seem that interested in the gender aspects of the film. They noted that, if Pavel has a younger woman, Helena also has (at least potentially) a younger man who admires her. But it seems to me that the film is far more asymmetrical than that would imply. Both Pavel and Ludvik are evidently womanizers of the traditional sort (Ludvik, in fact, gives his promiscuous habits as the reason why he never got married). But Helena doesn’t seem to have the same sort of latitude in terms of the behavior available to her, which is why she ends up playing the role of the humiliated victim.

In any case, women in this film are only go-betweens for the rivalries between men. This is something that the film doesn’t quite critique in (what we would call today) a feminist way; but at least it does call our attention to it, quite overtly and insistently. Throughout the film, action is only played out through substitution (as Ludvik’s remark at the very end clearly indicates). Ludvik’s bitterness and cynical rage are not appeased; he can only lash out at a substitute for the real object of his anger. In this way he gets a sort of comeuppance, although of course he is not humiliated quite in the way that Helena is. She is abused and abandoned by both men; Ludvik is really only destroyed by himself; while Pavel gets away entirely scot-free. In this way the crimes and oppressions of the past are perpetuated in the present, despite that present’s indifference to and ignorance of the past. The only character not indifferent to the past is Ludvik himself, who is oppressively enslaved to it. But the other characters, however oblivious, cannot escape the consequences of the past either. If Ludvik’s postcard was a joke that went astray, and had all sorts of unintended consequences, then all of history is such a cruel joke, and we are all the butts of it, even unknowingly.

Vera Chytilova’s Daisies (1966) manages to be both visceral and abstract, playful and savage, intellectual and infantile, all at once. Watching it last night, I was literally trembling with joy and exhilaration. I felt the same way when I first saw the film, nearly thirty years ago. in graduate school.

Daisies is a film of the Czech New Wave, but it doesn’t have much in common — aside from the rejection of traditional narrative, and of the aesthetics of “socialist realism” — with the other works of the movement. Chytilova, you might say, plays Godard to Jiri Menzel‘s Truffaut. (Chytilova and Menzel went to FAMU, the famed Czech film school together, become close friends, and occasionally worked together — see the biography of Chytilova here). Daisies is a riot of color, jump cuts and shock cuts and deliberate mismatches, garish pictorial inserts, incongruous nondiegetic music and sounds, and anti-naturalistic special effects. Sometimes the screen is in color, sometimes in black and white, sometimes tinted with monochromat filters, and sometimes awash in crazed pixelation (? — or whatever the pre-digital equivalent of this might be) effects. The film as a whole is a relentless assault — against film conventions and forms and indeed cinema itself, against social norms and rules and indeed society itself, and finally against the spectator. This assault is violently nihilistic, but it is also utterly joyous and gleeful: an explosion of affect, in which I share as I watch.

Daisies delights as well as shocks — probably, at this point, delights more than it shocks, if I can judge from the responses of my students viewing it last night. And yet, despite a certain degree of cult devotion, it hasn’t ever been given its rightful due in histories of film, or even in histories of experimental, radical, and avant-garde film. Owen Hatherley writes brilliantly about it (and I am deeply indebted to his analysis of the film); but his is the only discussion I have been able to find that is in any way adequate to the film’s astonishing force and radicality. Even those of us who love Daisies have trouble finding the proper terms to account for it.

Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the wake of Laura Mulvey’s groundbreaking article “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), there was a lot of debate on the subject of what it might mean to break away from conventional cinematic pleasures. Such pleasures, as Mulvey compellingly demonstrated, are embedded in structures of heterosexual male domination and female subordination. Mulvey herself calls (somewhat ambiguously) for an effort “to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space and the look of the audience into dialectics, passionate detachment.” But the main thrust of her essay was upon the “destruction of pleasure.” Mulvey called for a practice (both of criticism and of alternative filmmaking) that “destroys the satisfaction, pleasure and privilege” of conventional film viewing.

Much of the debate, after Mulvey, was over the question of whether feminist filmmaking would therefore have to be didactic, “alienating,” and intellectualizing; or whether other regimes of pleasure and affect, besides the patriarchal one, were attainable (or even conceivable). Did anyone notice that, a decade before Mulvey, Chytilova had already answered this question, in the affirmative? For the sheer joy of Daisies owes nothing to the mechanisms of identification and objectification, sadism and paranoia, that Mulvey dissects in her article. Daisies works, it works very powerfully indeed; but we don’t have a good language to describe how and why it works, and that is a large part of the reason it has been relegated to the margins of film history.

So, we have two girls — or young women, if you prefer; the actresses (Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbanova) are probably in their early twenties. (The IMDB doesn’t list their dates of birth, and says that neither of them ever acted in films again, aside from a couple of minor roles just after Daisies, in 1966 and 1967). We don’t even know these characters’ names — indeed, they are both called by a number of different names over the course of the film — though most discussions, and the credits list on IMDB, call them “Marie I” and “Marie II.”

After the opening credits — which are printed against a montage combining, on the one hand, shots of something that looks like a 1920s Constructivist or Dadaist machine-sculpture, and on the other hand, grainy video footage of wartime bombings and destruction — we see the two Maries seated, side by side and facing the camera, in some sort of open box or proscenium stage. Their bodies are stiff, their movements are awkward, as if they were puppets. Every time either of them moves a limb, we hear a loud creaking on the soundtrack, suggesting a kind of clumsy mechanical animation. They are bored. They tell each other that, because the world is “bad,” their only alternative is to be “bad” too. (Another translation has “spoiled” instead of “bad”).

The two Maries go on to indulge themselves in various sorts of antisocial behavior. They continually complain to one another, and squabble. But they don’t seem to have any stake in these arguments, and it’s impossible to make any consistent distinction between their points of view. (One is blonde and one brunette, and that’s as far as their differences go). They go out on dates to fancy restaurants with evidently well-to-do older men (what does this mean in the Communist context? We know that socialist society wasn’t as classless and egalitarian, nor as gender-equal, as it was supposed to be). The men buy them expensive drinks and food, hoping (presumably) to seduce them, but instead finding themselves having to cope with the girls’ raucous behavior. Marie and Marie wear short dresses; one of them wears her hair is in ponytails; both of them put on lots of eyeshadow. They seem less like vamps than like little girls playing dress-up, or (more disagreeably) like objects of pederastic fantasy (do I have the right word here? what is the heterosexual equivalent of “pederastic”?). The men never get the sex they were hoping for; instead they are hustled off to catch a train, and abandoned. The girls just laugh giddily, and go off to make more trouble.

The two Maries gleefully trash their own apartment, as well as all the public spaces they wander through; they are constantly on the move, from the latrine of some lavish restaurant, to the banks of the river, to the train station, and finally through the corridors and up the floors (riding in a dumbwaiter) of an imposing official building, where they find food and silverware lavishly and meticulously laid out for (we presume) some sort of State banquet. In the climactic sequence of the film, they proceed to trash the banquet room, stuffing themselves with giant portions of meat and poultry, devouring cake and booze, smashing plates and glasses, having tumultuous food fights, and finally swinging from the ceiling chandelier. Meantime, the soundtrack music is either portentous or martial, taken from Wagner’s Ring among other sources. Surely this is the greatest “food” sequence in the history of film.

A word of distinction is in order. The two Maries’ bad behavior isn’t anything like the girls-can-act-like-raunchy-frat-boys-too stuff we’ve seen so much of in recent years, whether in TV shows like Sex and the City, or in fashionable public behavior like that analyzed in Ariel Levy’s recent book Female Chauvinist Pigs. These are situations in which women displace men in order to take over the dominating phallic role for themselves — and end up, therefore, behaving just as stupidly and oppressively as men do.

But the two Maries’ behavior works in an entirely different register. It is completely infantile. They seem uninterested in sexuality per se: they only dress up in swinging-sixties-“sexy” garb the better to confound and humiliate older men (something they are interested in) and to create general confusion and disorder. Instead of sex, they are interested in food. They lose no opportunity to gorge themselves. And they take a child’s pleasure in breaking stuff, shredding stuff, and burning stuff. In particular, they are continually cutting things up with scissors. This latter action resonates with “cutting” in the cinematic sense; their aggression is matched by Chytilova’s anti-continuity editing, which often cuts correctly on action or on an object, only in order to place everything abruptly into a totally different setting. In one sequence, the Maries cut up parts of their own bodies on screen — one’s arm suddenly disappears, followed by the other’s head; finally the screen image itself gets cut, breaking up into small squares squirming all over the frame.

In Freudian terms, one might say that sexuality has been repressed in favor of a regression to oral — narcissistic, incorporating, and aggressive — drives and pleasures. But I think the Maries’ behavior is better seen affirmatively, as a positive construction, rather than as a reaction or regression. The movement from sexuality to food is, precisely, a detournement in the Situationist sense, rather than a “failure of development.” It is also a Rimbaudian “systematic derangement of the senses,” and a Nietzschean movement, a striving “to realize in oneself the eternal joy of becoming — that joy which also encompasses joy in destruction.” Though certainly Nietzsche never imagined this happening in so delightfully “girlie” a manner as it does here.

The two Maries’ delight in gorging themselves on food and drink is intimately connected with their delight in cutting. Their play with scissors evidently implies castration. Besides newspapers, bedspreads, and their own and others’ clothing, they are also continually snipping up phallic objects like sausages and pickles — as well as presumptively feminine ones like apples. (Castration, figurative or literal, seems to be a recurring theme in Chytilova’s work. One of her far more recent films, Traps (1998), which unfortunately I have never had the opportunity to see, aroused much controversy for its story of a woman who castrates the two men who raped her).

Destroying the phallus doesn’t just mean undermining male power, but undermining the power of the whole “Symbolic Order.” Among othet things, it means destroying the opposition — or undermining the gap — between things and words, or more broadly between things and their representations (whether these be verbal or visual). At one point, one of the Maries cuts out a picture of food from a magazine, then stuffs it into her mouth and chews it up with the same avidity she shows for actual food. This is in the course of a scene where the two Maries roast sausages by setting fires and burning down parts of their apartment. Then they spear and cut the wieners with an enormous cook’s fork, and an equally enormous pair of scissors. All the while they laugh at the complaints of a jilted lover, whose pathetic pleadings are heard over the phone. During the entire scene, some sort of sacramental choral music plays, nondiegetically, in the background.

Everything the two Maries do is destructive. They revel in sheer waste, in “unemployed negativity,” in “expenditure without return.” Above all, Daisies expresses utter scorn for any sort of productivity, whether economic, social, or semiotic This, of course, is a major reason why the film was denounced by Party authorities for wasting the resources of the State, and insulting “the working people in factories, in fields, and on construction sites.” As production was the highest value in all the socialist states, the general derision which Daisies pours on the very concept is actually more disturbing to official ideology than a more explicit, specific, and immediate criticism of the social system would have been.

There is one sequence in Daisies in which the two Maries watch a farmer watering his crops. He doesn’t notice them, despite their outlandish attire. They then stand in a square they are passed by a squad of bicyclists, probably workers going off to their work in a factory. Once again, nobody notices them. They start to wonder whether they even exist: obviously, there is no place for them in the world of “actually existing socialism.”

(It’s dubious whether they could exist in “actually existing capitalism” either. Their orgies of expenditure might be seen as a sort of consumerist excess, except that they never pay for anything. They steal money, but they never spend it. They have no regard for, and no sense of, property; no sense of material goods as a source of power or prestige. Their infantilism, unlike that of the capitalist consumer, unegotistical. They have no interest in possession and accumulation).

After the Maries destroy the State banquet, the film ends with their display of remorse, and punishment for their bad behavior. This formulaic recantation is done so sarcastically that it only further accentuates the film’s overall childish glee in pure waste and destruction. (Is it worth noting that, after the Soviet invasion of 1968, Chytilova and other Czech New Wave directors were similarly forced to make critiques and recantations of their work?) The Maries mumble their sorrow, and say that now they are happy to be socially useful, as they ostensibly put everything back in order: this involves putting the shards of broken plates back next to each other, and throwing handfuls of crumbs back together on large platters. Finally they lie down on the top of the banquet table, wearing body suits made of newspaper and papier mache, murmuring that they are finally at peace… until the room’s enormous chandelier falls from the ceiling and crushes them in a final swoosh of multicolored pixelation. Though Chytilova claimed, under political duress, that this was a moral punishment for the girls’ transgressions, it seems rather to extend their reign of destruction, consuming not only the two of them, but the film itself.

What’s great about Daisies is that, even as it revels in negativity and destruction, and even as its protagonists are motivated (to the extent that such language can be used in a film like this at all) by a kind of malaise, there is no sense of lack or incompletion here, no alienated subjectivity, no Lacanian not-all, no Mulveyesque dialectics and detachment, and even no Adornoesque revelation of the work’s own insufficiency — but only a joyous plenitude, an overabundance that is both affective and material, embodied in the sheer exuberance and formal inventiveness of the film itself.

The early modernist endeavor to align radical aesthetics with radical politics came to grief over the horrors of Stalinism, not to mention the ultra-conservative aesthetics of “socialist realism” that Stalin imposed. In post-War, post-Stalin, Communist Eastern Europe, Dusan Makavejev is nearly alone in endeavoring to renew the link between radical aesthetics and radical politics. Chytilova’s late modernist radical aesthetics doesn’t share any such project. It is explicitly, not just apolitical, but virulently antipolitical. Rather than simply affirming the rights of the individual against the collective — a move which would still be “political” in the conventional sense — Daisies obliterates both individual and collective in its fervidly antisocial jouissance. (The two Maries cannot exist without one another; their duality is as irreducible to any sort of heroic or existential solitude and individuality, as it is to any sort of social bond or collectivity). And this antipolitical virulence is precisely the film’s (crucial) political import: one that perhaps we need today, in our “connected” world of inescapable networks and ubiquitous commodification, as much as it was needed 40-odd years ago in the world of “actually existing socialism.”

What would a history of film, or of modernism, or of the avant-garde, or an account of strategies of resistance and evasion and refusal, that took proper and full account of Daisies look like?

Milos Forman’s Loves of a Blonde (1965) uses many of the same comic strategies that he subsequently employed in The Fireman’s Ball, though the two films differ greatly in terms of the subject matter to which the comic touch is applied. As I wrote of The Fireman’s Ball, so here “throughout the film, pointless arguments go on at almost excruciating length, without ever reaching a moment of open conflict, let alone resolution.”

In both films, comedy arises mostly from delays, misapprehensions, failures of communication, and a general sense of awkwardness and self-consciousness. In Loves of a Blonde, this is exacerbated by an awareness of, and the unsuccessful attempt to emulate, fashions from the West. Loves of a Blonde dates from the period of Beatlemania and swinging London; the people in the film are evidently at least somewhat aware of the consumerist styles associated with these developments, however much such styles were disparaged and repressed by the Czech regime at the time. Over the opening credits, for instance, we see and hear a young woman, with an acoustic guitar, singing a rock ‘n’ roll ballad which is notable by its contrast to the older-fashioned dance music heard elsewhere in the film. (One of Forman’s earliest films, which I’ve never seen, was a documentary that juxtaposed the rehearsals of a Czech rock band with those of a traditional brass band).

But in Loves of a Blonde the subject is sex and gender and romantic illusions and fantasy and familial relationships – rather than the pompousness of an overbearing bureaucracy that is the main theme of The Fireman’s Ball. So the effect is far less satirical and abrasive than will be the case in the later film. Instead, Loves of a Blonde works in a more intimate and affective register — though its results are largely disillusioning.

The protagonist, Andula (Hanu Brejchova) is a young woman who works in a shoe factory out in the provinces, and lives and sleeps in a barracks or dormitory with lots of other young women workers. There’s almost nothing to do in this town, and the gender ratio of women to men is something like 20:1. (Apparently, according to Dina Iordoanova’s invaluable book Cinema of the Other Europe, this situation was quite common in Czechoslovakia at the time: pp 130-131). The factory work is presented as boring, repetitious, unfulfilling, and alienating, if not as horrific as (more or less accurate) cinematic portrayals of capitalist sweatshops tend to be. The evident failure of “actually existing socialism” to meet its promises is doubled by an equally evident, and all too traditional, gender hierarchy: the only men we see in the factory (or even in the town) are far older than the women, and have managerial positions.

To rectify the boredom and gender imbalance, the factory authorities convince the army to bring in a bunch of troops to have a party at the local pub — basically it is one big mixer — with the girls. The trouble is, the soliders turn out to be, not young draftees, but reservists: i.e. middle aged men who have been called up for a brief tour of duty, and who have wives and children waiting for them back home. Much comedy ensues as these men try to hide their wedding rings, and figure out what lines to use to pick up the girls who evidently don’t find them the least bit appealing. There’s a great sequence where Forman cuts repeatedly back and forth between a table at which three sad-sack reservists sit, trying to work up their nerve; and the table where Andula and two of her girlfriends sit, commenting snarkily but also nervously about the grossness of these men who are all too evidently staring at them.

The comedy here is largely behavioral. It arises out of the awkward feelings of the characters, together with the tension coming from the obvious mismatch between them. Everything is uneventful and anticlimactic. It’s like a joke whose nervous humor comes precisely from the fact that there is no punchline, no release from the vague uneasiness of the situation. (Surely early Forman is one of the inspirations for Jim Jarmusch, whose existential comedy has often been described as “Eastern European” in feel. But Forman shows none of the hipster smugness which sometimes vitiates the work of the otherwise brilliant Jarmusch).

Loves of a Blonde actually does have a three-act structure, despite Forman’s de-emphasizing of plot and deliberate causalness of presentation As is characteristic of the New Wave (either French or Czech) there’s a kind of simultaneous naturalism and formalism. Naturalism, because the tight narrative motivation of traditional film is deliberately rejected. Scenes and incidents are dwelt on for their own sake, even when they have no significance for the larger story. This is in order to let us perceive in greater, more intimate detail the minute-to-minute feelings and experiences of the characters, and the nature of the milieu in which they live. Formalism, because at the same time we are made more aware of the camera and the editor than would be the case in traditional narrative film. The formal nature of the film is pointed up by the deliberate arbitrariness of editing, the frequent elisions when we move from one scene to another, the often deliberately posed and composed nature of many of the shots, which give the impression of being stills (and sometimes even are).

Loves of a Blonde nevertheless, as I said, maintains a three-act structure. The first act is the party I have already described. The second consists in the depiction of a one-night stand. Andula flees the reservists, but she is picked up and seduced by a man her own age — Milda (Vladimir Pucholt), a pianist from Prague, who has come down to the provinces as part of the band providing dance music for the mixer. Gradually, he coaxes her up to his room, out of her clothes, and into his bed. It’s kind of a game: the moves on both sides, his insistence, her reluctance, her ultimate acquiescence, are all familiar in gender-stereotypical ways. As if to emphasize this, the editing here is especially elliptical, the two-shots of Andula and Milda especially picturesque and composed. The beauty-in-fragmentation of this section of the film reminded me a bit of the parallel scenes — reduced almost to a sort of Cubist abstraction — in which the protagonist of Godard’s A Married Woman has sex, first with her husband, then with her lover. Forman’s staging is a bit less alienating than Godard’s — he wants to make us feel Andula’s romantic illusions even as he exposes them as self-deceptions, whereas Godard is after a harsher critique of the zombification and alienation to which consumer society reduces women. Forman’s scene is also funny in ways that Godard’s could not be — there’s a whole bit with a windowshade that keeps on rolling back up when Milda pulls it down, and eventually falls out of the windowframe entirely. This bit of slapstick is, however, framed and edited in the same coolly abstract manner as the rest of the sequence.

In the third act, Andula — either unaware, or unwilling to accept, that Milda’s fling with her was just a passing whim and nothing more — shows up at Milda’s apartment in the big city. Only Milda isn’t there — he’s out performing, and chasing other women — and, it turns out, he lives with his parents anyway. Andula’s presence sets off an interminable round of bickering — first between his mother and father, and then involving Milda himself as well, when he finally does get home. Everyone’s stuck in their roles in the eternal familial triangle: we get a whole panoply of generational conflict, gender conflict, conflict of tradition vs. modernity, etc etc. The somewhat bitter humor of the situation — this is something that clearly can, and does, go on forever, as the parents and adult child are united in dysfunction, bound together by their squabbles as much as by anything — is the sort of thing that is often said to be quintessentially Czech; though I recognized it as something quite closely akin to (Ashkenazi) Jewish humor. I suppose it’s our common East European heritage.

The final sequence of the film returns us to the beginning — at both the start and the end of the film, we see Andula in bed, in the barracks, with another girl, telling her tales of romantic desire and success. She says, in this last sequence, that the visit to the pianist was wonderful, that it all went well, and that she will be going back to see him every weekend. It doesn’t seem that she is lying, so much as that she semi-believes her fabrications herself. The more tenuous and insubstantial the event, the more fleeting the memory, and thereby the more it is available to be woven into romantic fantasy. Forman doesn’t condemn the fantasy; rather, he suggests, given the grimness of her actual life, this sort of illusion is the only thing that Andula has. We in the audience are disabused of whatever romantic illusions we may have; but at the same time we are gently, insidiously seduced into accepting them — for Andula, at least, of whom it’s impossible not to feel somewhat fond — as a comfort and a compensation.

I tend, in general, to have an almost visceral dislike of the idea that art, or romance, ought to comfort us with lies, and shield us from the harshness of the real: in this way art and romance render themselves complicit with the injustices and oppressions of the dominant social order. The delight we receive from fictions ought to impel and incite us to demand something better, rather than reconciling us to what is. Today, under the reign of the neoliberal world market, it is almost an Kantian moral duty for us to continue to hope, and to resist our leaders’ assurances that there is simply No Alternative. — I think, however, that what Forman does in Loves of a Blonde is precisely to demonstrate how, under the demoralizing effects of “actually existing socialism,” the pallid comfort of self-deception through romantic illusion really was the best that one could hope for.

Andrzej Munk’s Eroica (1958) was made just before Bad Luck (which I discussed in a previous post). It’s less ambitious than that later film, but displays a similar anti-heroic and myth-deflating sensibility, as it reflects on the calamities of Poland’s 20th-century history.

Eroica is composed of two separate episodes (each about 40 minutes long) set near the end of World War II. In the first episode, “Scherzo alla Polacca,” a small-time opportunist, who dislikes the thought of doing arduous work or taking risks, nonetheless finds himself having to cross the German/Polish frontlines several times, in order to deliver messages vital to the Resistance. In the second, “Ostinato Lugubre,” a bunch of captured Polish officers fail to escape from a German POW camp, in which most of them have been interned for the entire duration of the War.

In “Scherzo alla Polacca,” the protagonist Dzidzius (Edward Dziewonski) is farcically anti-heroic. He drifts into Resistance work almost by accident; he finds his wife cavorting with a handsome Hungarian officer, and wants to get out of town. He learns from the officer that the Hungarian military unit occupying the town would like to change sides, abandoning the Nazis (who are clearly losing the war by this point) and giving their weapons to the Resistance, in return for favorable treatment from the Soviet Army whenever it arrives. Dzidzius has to deliver messages back and forth across the frontlines in order to help negotiate the terms of this exchange. He makes his way, confronted both by Nazis who find him suspicious, or Resistance people who worry he is a spy, first through bribery — until he runs out of money — and then by grovelling and play-acting. Since he’s easily distracted from his mission — getting drunk on vintage wine he loots from a half-destroyed house, and getting it on with a woman he knows in the Resistance — he really only completes his task by accident. But it turns out at the end that the entire exercise was useless: the Resistance and the Hungarians cannot come to an agreement.

The most famous shot in the movie (sorry I am not including it here, but I returned the DVD before I got a chance to scan it) shows Dzidzius sitting on a riverbank, getting drunk, and not even seeing a German tank that approaches him from behind. When he finally notices the tank, he convinces the Germans not to kill him by rolling around on the ground, making a big spectacle of his drunkenness, and wailing, in broken German, about his aged and infirm mother (this latter part seems to be pure fabrication). We hear laughter from inside the tank, which then turns and rolls away, instead of shooting Dzidzius.

“Ostinato Lububre” takes place entirely within the perimeter of a POW camp, near the end of the war (probably in late 1944). Two new officers, just captured and interned, meet their bunkmates who, it turns out, have all been there ever since surrendering right at the start of the War, in September 1939. Their life as prisoners — governed scrupulously by the Geneva Convention — is relatively sheltered, peaceful, and comfortable, compared to the lot of anybody who is actually out there back in Poland, suffering under the Nazi occupation. Since they have almost nothing to do, they spend their time in petty squabbles and stupid games. They endlessly bemoan the impossibility of escaping — but it is clear that they don’t really want to. The one exception is Lieutenant Zak (Jozef Kostecki), who hates them all and wishes only to be placed in solitary confinement so he can be free of them; Zak, as a sort of demonstration, easily slips through the camp’s barbed wire and out to “freedom,” only to let himself be recaptured, a minute later, by two peasant women out for a stroll. Even this stunt fails to get him placed in solitary — he is just returned to the same barracks as the others.

The prisoners comfort and coddle themselves in their inactivity by frequently recalling the almost mythical exploit of the only one of their number who escaped, Lieutenant Zawistowski (Tadeusz Lomnicki). But it turns out that Zawistowski never actually did get out — he is simply hiding in a crawl space in the barracks, fed by the few fellow prisoners who are in on the secret. Not only does the myth of heroisim serve as an alibi for stupidity and inaction; it isn’t even based on anything true in the first place.

Both episodes work to deflate and demystify national myths, of heroism and patriotism and resistance. Munk excels at a kind of comical emptying-out: not only of the false ideals he seeks to satirize, but of the very notion of a cinema of action. His farcical incidents all occur in a void: they are what happens, you might say, when nothing is happening, when there are no real Events. I’m reminded a bit of Howard Hawk’s semi-absurdist John Wayne/Dean Martin Western, Rio Bravo, made around the same time (1959). In Rio Bravo , too, nothing happens for most of the movie: the protagonists just sit around having aimless conversations while they wait for an event that takes its good time, before arriving. But of course, Hawks’ film does culminate in a real Event — the final gunfight — and thereby it does affirm, if not the full myth of Heroism, then at least its Hawksian mutation into a seasoned, committed professionalism, which emerges as a source of both pride and redemption. In contrast, Munk offers the viewer no such outlet, no such conclusion. We are left stranded, instead, with the sense that you can never be on the right side of History, but only make more or less cowardly, more or less stupid, more or less dishonorable, accomodations to its unavoidable weight.

Jiri Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains (1966) is probably the best-known film (though probably not the best) from the Czech New Wave of the early 1960s. (It won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1968). It is the first of five Czech New Wave films (actually, four Czech and one Slovak) that I am showing in my Eastern European Film class this semester.

Closely Watched Trains is a film of many little virtues. With an emphasis on the “little,” as this is a film which eschews larger ambitions, much as its young protagonist, Milos (Vaclav Neckar) does — he tells us that he is glad to work as a train dispatcher at the local station, because he is basically lazy, and this job is one that doesn’t demand too much of him. The film is set during World War II — a politically safe subject to choose in mid-1960s Czechoslovakia. But it is much more a coming-of-age film than a war-and-heroism one, even though this latter is what it becomes at the end. Aside from doing as little work as possible, Milos is most concerned with losing his virginity — or overcoming the condition of “premature ejaculation” that has thus far prevented him from losing it. In his despair over this, he even tries to commit suicide at one point, though the film doesn’t take this happening very seriously.

So, we have a film with quirky, singular characters, each of whom has his (generally it’s a he) own little obsessions; with finely observed details, organized around the slow and sleepy pace of provincial life; with an abundant, but wry and very dry, humor; with an empathetic but somewhat distanced point of view; and with a bittersweet tone. My description comes very close to being a cliche: both of a certain type of unambitious but much-beloved art film, and of an alleged Czech sensibility. What then, distinguishes Closely Watched Trains in particular? (aside from the fact that it more or less set the pattern for what I am calling a cliche).

Closely Watched Trains has antecedents, of course, both in Czech literature — Jaroslav Hasek’s Good Soldier Svejk, as well as the novel by Bohumil Hrabal on which the film is based — and in cinema — I sense the presence here of Francois Truffaut’s early work. But it feels fresh nonetheless. The question is why. I notice that both Richard Schickel’s notes for the Criterion Collection’s DVD of the film, and Tom Keogh’s notes on the film at Amazon both approach the film by way of expressing a certain degree of (rhetorical) surprise at how well it holds up after all these years (and all the imitations).

I think the power of the film has a lot to do with its cinematography, and its pacing — both of which are far less laid-back and casual than they might at first appear to be. (Of course, the appearance of casualness actually requires quite a lot of difficult planning and work on the part of the filmmaker). As was the tendency for the Czech New Wave (as for the French New Wave a few years earlier), Menzel does not interested in elaborately setting up the film’s plot events and situations: he just plunks us into the middle of them. Also, he makes us infer motivation and mood from behavior, and from visual and sonic set-ups, rather than bringing us more directly into the minds of the characters. Once past the opening titles, the film begins with Milos’ first-person voiceover narration — but this is quickly dropped, and does not reappear later in the film. There are almost no close-ups, and no elaborate speeches or other indications of the characters’ motivations for doing what they do. Camera angles are continually varying, which has the effect of suggesting variation and change even when not much is happening, and which generally works against sort of deep identification with the characters (not that ti is “alienating,” but just that it denies us the sense of repetition which is necessary in order for identifications to form). Non-diegetic music is used sparingly, and then mostly just for ironic contrast (like the somewhat comic martial music that comes up whenever the local Nazi boss makes a visit).

All of this makes for a film that is more concerned with sensation and observation than with affect. And thus for a film that privileges wry humor and sympathetic distance, rather than the far more frequent cinematic mechanism of hysterical overidentification (I am using this latter phrase in a purely descriptive, rather than pejorative, sense). I am tempted to say that Closely Watched Trains is something like an inverted Rube Goldberg machine. That is to say, in this film the chains of causal relations are as oblique and surprising as they are in Rube Goldberg machines — it is always a question of external relations. But whereas Rube Goldberg machines rely on an absurdly hyperbolic and methodical, even paranoid, overorganization, Menzel’s film makes its (equally contingent and absurd) associative links through subjective states of drift and inattention. The film’s humor comes from its incongruities, but the narrative moves forward through incongruities as well. There is a series of connections, but these connections unfold at seeming random, sort of like a Rube Goldberg machine in slow motion.

Let me give an example, even at risk of both giving away the plot, and of making that plot sound convoluted and “difficult,” when in fact it is quite slack and laid-back, and altogether clear and easy to follow. Milos, after being rescued from his suicide attempt, goes around asking everyone, without any sense of propriety or embarrassment, for help and advice with his ejaculation problem. (This utter lack of shame or self-consciousness is part of what makes Milos, and the film in general, so charming and endearing). One of the people he asks is the stationmaster’s wife — as he approaches her, she is sitting calmly, and preparing a goose for the cookpot by smoothing or shaving (I wasn’t quite sure) force-feeding a duck, making the food go down by stroking its long neck — in what, in this context, cannot help but appear as a phallic gesture. The promise of this gesture is taken up a few scenes later, when one of Milos’ superiors, the womanizer Hubicka (Josef Somr) sets him up with an “experienced” slightly older woman, who does initiate him into sexuality with an attention to his needs such as that which the scene with the goose sort of implied. But this woman is a resistance fighter, delivering to Hubicka the bomb to blow up a German train; and it’s because Hubicka is made the subject of a (more ridiculous than scary) inquest by the Nazis on account of his womanizing activities (he is accused of offending the dignity of the State by stamping the official bureaucratic ink stamps of the train office on a young lady’s posterior) that Milos becomes the one who actually has to throw the bomb onto the train — which is what leads, at the end of the film, to his almost accidental death (he is shot by a Nazi soldier who acts more on principle — kill any of the locals who might be seen as stepping out of line — than by any awareness of the bomb — which the soldier has not seen, and which does successfully destroy the train a few seconds later).

In this way, Milos’ death at the end of Closely Watched Trains — and his thereby becoming, quite unintentionally, a hero of the Resistance — unfolds with exactly the same logic, and the same sort of weightlessness, as all of the comic incidents throughout the film. And this is Menzel’s way of describing the odd, and thoroughly contingent, ways that individual lives get inscribed into History. Throughout the film, the Nazi occupation is described as a burden, but nothing more — the employees at the train station have to pay obeisance, and pay attention, when the local Nazi little tyrant comes around, but as soon as he leaves, they go back to acting as they always did, ignoring whatever orders and exhortations they have received. Milos’ death reminds us that such a lackadaisical attitude does not provide any sort of exemption from the horrors of war and tyranny; but it does suggest (once again) that these relations are, in principle, external ones rather than innerly determining ones — however mortal they may turn out to be in practice. And that is how Menzel clears away a sort of free space, even amidst the horrors and traumas of 20th century history. Closely Watched Trains does skirt close to the edge of a certain cliche. as I suggested earlier (and to a postmodern taste, “charm” is far more troubling than any sort of sleaziness or exploitation or even frank stupidity could be), but it manages to remain deftly on its razor’s edge through its gaps and silences, its comic digressions, and its oblique meditation on history and contingency.

Knife in the Water (1962) was Roman Polanski’s first feature film, and the only one he made in Poland (and in Polish) before leaving for the West and English-language cinema. It is evidently of a piece with Polanski’s subsequent work, in terms of its nihilism, its chill and creepiness, its generally smothering affect.

Knife in the Water is quite strikingly different from the films made by the Polish directors of the previous generation (or half-generation, given that these directors were only a decade or so older than Polanski) like Wajda and Munk.. In Polanski’s fillm, there is no reference to World War II, or to Poland’s other historical traumas; and no sign of the Italian neorealist influence that was evident in Wajda and Munk.

Polanski seems to evacuate history and society quite deliberately, as his film has only three characters (no other human beings are seen, not even as extras), and unfolds first in a car driving through uninhabited forest, and then largely on a yacht, sailing through a series of lakes that mostly seem devoid of human habitation. We see, at best, the debris, byproducts, or tools of human labor: construction vehicles standing idle, because it is Sunday; logs floating in a lake, near the shore, waiting to be sent downstream. The car seen at the beginning of the film is left parked overnight; when the owners return to it the next morning, at the end of the movie, the windshield wipers have been stolen. But we do not see the vandals, or get any hint of who they were.

In the context of “actually existing socialism,” it’s hard to read this as anything but a violent, willful negation of historical consciousness, of socialist (or any other sort of) humanism, of social realism, and of political and social “responsibility.” Polanski’s attitude is brattishly asocial or anti-social, even though, at the same time, the film suggests that there is no escaping society. For we need other people to exploit, or to demonstrate our superiority over.

All this is expressed as much in the style of the film as in its script and story. There are lots of claustrophobic closeups, but rarely of just one character: usually two, or even all three, of the actors are squeezed into a single shot. Often one character is quite close to the camera, but the other two are also present, slightly further back. Thus we get the in-your-face, affect-heavy effect of close-ups, but — how do I put this? — without the kind of overflowing intensity that one gets from, say, the close-ups of Falconetti in Dreyer’s Joan of Arc (or for that matter, the close-ups in many of Samuel Fuller’s films). Instead, there’s a tension: the affect not of any of the characters, but between them, the affect of the void. In the background, and in the rare longer shots, there is always the wilderness, which never looks inviting, but either blank or ominous. There’s no identification with these characters, then, despite how we are almost thrust in their faces. The film is suffused with the affects of coldness and cruelty.

(I should also mention the soundtrack, as well as the images. The score, by Polanski’s frequent collaborator (until his untimely death in 1969) Krzysztof Komeda, has a tense, 50s-jazz sort of vibe. But this score doesn’t suffuse the film, it only punctuates it at certain moments — or rather, I should say the reverse: the score is itself frequently punctuated by silence, long stretches when all we hear is ambient noise. This punctuation, or scansion, makes for a lot of the tension in the movie).

The three characters are a 40-something married couple, Andrzej (Leon Niemczyk) and Krystyna (Jolanta Umecka), and a younger (20ish?) student or drifter, who remains unnamed (Zygmunt Malanowicz). [Digressive Note: I see from IMDB that Leon Niemczyk just died this past November, and that shortly before his death he appeared in David Lynch’s Inland Empire, which is probably the one new film that I am most itching to see]. Andrzej and Krystyna are driving through the woods, when they encounter the young man hitchhiking; they give him a ride, and then invite him aboard their yacht.

The social world is present in the film precisely, but only, through what we learn of these peoples’ backgrounds. Andrzej is apparently a sportswriter, and he and Krystyna evidently belong to the Party elite (what in the Soviet Union was called the nomenklatura), as is evidenced by the very fact that they own a car and a yacht (as well as, Krystyna says at one point, a 4-room apartment). They also exude a sort of smugness, deriving from a reflexive sense of privilege, which they completely take for granted.

The younger man says very little about his background, and what he does say is unreliable. He describes himself variously as a drifter, a hiker, and a student; he seems, like most of the population in this alleged “workers’ state”, to have few or no possessions. Aside, that is, from the large, mean-looking switchblade knife he is prone to display at every opportunity.

Given the deliberate decontextualization of all these differences, and the limitaitons in what we know about the characters’ pasts, the “class struggle” — as well as the generational struggle between the two men — gets played out in a Hobbesian or Darwinian register, rather than in a Marxist (or Freudian) one.

All the exchanges between the three characters are driven by buried suggestions of aggression and violence. Andrzej’s and Krystyna’s relationship is evidently several degrees below dead. Andrzej insults and patronizes the hitchhiker, then invites him aboard through a sort of vicious condescension. The young man accepts the invitation through a kind of swagger — he seems anxious to take on a dare. (We first encounter him when he stops Andrzej’s and Krystyna’s car by standing in the middle of the road as it approaches — giving them the sole alternatives of stopping for him, or running him over).

The outing quickly turns into a macho duel (a pissing contest?) between the two men, with the woman serving as spectator and judge of the contest, as well as being its stake. Andrzej asserts the authority of his age, of his social position, of his superior knowledge as a seaman and a social insider, and of his authority as the “skipper” of the ship. The young man responds with arrogant cockiness, physical daring (he shimmies up the mast at one point, and — on a dare — holds a pot of boiling water in his bare hands at another), and displays of his superior virility (on account of his youth, and also through overt phallic displays — there’s no ambiguity as to the connotations of the knife). (It’s worth noting in this respect, and apropos of the title of the film, that Andrzej is unable to appropriate the knife — he can only deprive the younger man of it by throwing it overboard).

In this contest, the younger man gets the better of Andrzej — at least in the sense that he gets to bed the woman, and then walks away scot-free. But summarizing the plot of the film in this way is misleading. For one thing, the real “winner” (to the extent there is one) is Krystyna. She manages both to put the younger man in his place, and to get the sexual gratification from him that her husband fails to provide. And she manages thereby also to humiliate and subjugate Andrzej, taking his pretensions down a few notches, and altering the balance of power between them in her favor. At the end of the film, Andrzej is (metaphorically) paralyzed or castrated, stopping the car at a (both literal and metaphorical) crossroads, and not sure which way to go.

Krystyna’s “victory” also marks a defeat for the younger man. His virility has been reduced to a merely instrumental status. For all his confident and contempt-filled self-assurance, he turns out to have been nothing but a go-between, or a tool, in the power struggle between the couple. (We realize that Andrzej and Krystyna are the people who really hate one another, although this is not expressed openly at any point in the film. The young man does get to walk away at the end of the film: he’s not trapped in the situation the way the two of them are. But the young man also hasn’t gained anything from the contest, besides (we presume) a fleeting instant of pleasure; and he has amply paid for this with the loss of his knife.

I still haven’t managed to explain what is the most powerful thing about Knife in the Water, which is its obliqueness. Nothing of the contest (or three-way war) that I have been describing is quite there on the surface. I don’t mean that it’s hidden, exactly: the three characters are all fully aware of what’s going on, and so is the audience. But in this strange battle, no blows are ever thrown directly. Rather, the fighting is all done in the form of insinuations and implications. The young man doesn’t actually threaten the older couple with his knife, for instance. He doesn’t have to; the mere presence of the knife is enough. Throughout the film, even the most casual statements and gestures are fraught with heavy, and usually ugly, meanings. But for this very reason, nearly all the film’s statement and gestures are (merely?) casual and impromptu. One of the many things the film withholds from us is the hysterical sense of rising to a climax of craziness or viciousness.

By the end of the film, we are forced to realize that what we have witnessed is nothing more than a series of futile stupidities. And this, I think, is the deepest sense in which the film is nihilistic and anti-humanist. Polanski offers us no redemption; even more, he condemns our very desire for redemption (or for narrative resolution) by so deliberately frustrating it. This is profoundly subversive and unsettling, both to the “socialst” state in which the film was originally made, and in the hypercapitalistic state of things within which we experience the film today. Macho contests are a staple of Hollywood cinema, after all, and they generally end by promising some sort of redemption through violence. (Think of nearly anything from Straw Dogs to Reservoir Dogs, or from Charles Bronson to Sylvester Stallone to Mel Gibson). Even Clint Eastwood, who uses his iconic status as a hero of masculine violence in order to demystify and deconstruct such violence from within, never made anything nearly as disillusioning as this. In Knife in the Water, even the emblematic gesture with which the masculine hero tosses away his badge, or his gun, after having inflicted and survived all the violence — even this gesture is reduced to triviality and stupidity. Polanski leaves us with no alibis.