- Nemec’s A Report on the Party and the Guests screens twice next week.
Starting in the mid-1950s, the Soviet Union entered into a period of cultural thaw, easing up on censorship and other repressive practices. Many of the Eastern Bloc nations followed suit, resulting in a flourishing of arts movements. One of the most internationally renowned was the cinematic new wave of Czechoslovakia, which produced works of social satire that would have been impossible during the Stalin era (such as Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball and Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting) and more fantastical works that incorporated elements of literary and visual surrealism (like Vera Chytilova’s Fruit of Paradise and Jaromil Jires’s Valerie and Her Week of Wonders). Starting Friday, Facets Multimedia will host a touring retrospective of Jan Nemec, a key figure in this movement and one whose films get revived here less often that those by Forman and Chytilova.
- Martyrs of Love
Nemec would live in numerous countries over the next 15 years, including the United States. He would work in public television and, in one of his least likely commissions, record the wedding ceremony of the Swedish king in 1976. He resumed his filmmaking career on his own terms after returning to Czechoslovakia in 1989. The series includes three works from this post-Communist period: Late Night Talks With Mother; Toyen (2004), an experimental documentary about the eponymous Czech painter (screening Saturday at 5 PM and Tuesday 3/18 at 9 PM); and The Ferrari Dino Girl (2009), in which Nemec revisits the fallout surrounding Oratorio for Prague (screening Monday 3/17 and Wednesday 3/19 at 9 PM).
