So, Glastonbury festival is under way and as people wallow in the mud watching the likes of Bono and his backing band or B'ouncy all the clever people are in the comfort of their homes either watching films, wondering what films to watch or downloading Midnight Video 11.
The show heads east first of all for a Slovakian interpretation of a Brothers Grimm tale with Perinbaba, then we go due south and drop in on a Turkish museum in Topkapi before we do a 180 and go north to Edinburgh where two horror titans face each other for a final time in The Body Snatcher.
Right click the post's title to download or click on the archive link to the right of the page. But I hear all the cool kids subscribe to us through iTunes.
And don't forget to keep checking the blog and our Facebook page for supplemental material.
"Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them." - Pauline Kael
Don't be put off of Jakubisko because of Perinbaba - the Czechoslovak filmmakers were heavily hindered after 1969 (Jakubisko even fled the country to complete one of his films and another was halted indefinitely halfway through), and yet when he was allowed to do as he wanted he made some of the most amazing and hilarious films. Many of the idiosyncratic filmmakers were forced to turn to films for children after the Soviets rolled in the tanks, and thus you get Gilliam-esque - which I would take as more of an insult to Gilliam since here Jakubisko is trying to both avoid censorship and appeal to kids. Age may not have been too kind to him, either. His early films are hilarious, crazy, touching, and totally adult, and I would not write him off for elements beyond his control. When the Czechoslovak filmmakers were free to do as they wished they were truly creative and amazing (don't start with the 'popular favorites', though - they're rather tame and plain: good but not particularly distinct from similar films made in every other place at every time in the history of film creation).
ReplyDeleteYeh, I know it sounded like we had a bit of a downer on Perinbaba, I'm definitely going to check out more Jakubisko movies (I'll try and rope JIm into watching some as well!), particularly his early ones (of which I have managed to find a couple). I did watch Milos Forman's Black Peter recently, which I really loved, very 'nouvelle vague' but delightfully funny and idiosyncratic.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the Czechoslovak folks are interesting in that they're one of the only 'movements' whose central films were almost all comedies and black comedies, few dramas. There's the overbearing Shop on Main Street, and a few of Vlacil's films, but even his grand poetic sprawling historical epic is, in the end, a comedy in the classical sense (albeit a restrained, near-cosmic one - perhaps cosmic in the medieval sense). There are a ton of great ones, from light and realistic to a plethora of surreal to the very, very dark, to the abstract. Nobody takes comedy seriously, black comedy (the most serious of all!) especially. Birds, Orphans, and Fools is incredibly hilarious, wildly inventive, and in fact somewhat of a response to 'seriousness'. I can't imagine that someone could find it anything but endlessly enjoyable. Easily one of my favorite films.
ReplyDelete