Automotive Associations in Post–New Wave Films by Czech Directors

Abstract

from the release of political satires and psychedelic experiments to the receival of its first Academy Awards, Czechoslovakia in the 1960s gained international recognition as a wellspring of cinema from its end of the Iron Curtain. The Czech New Wave movement that coincided with the liberalized era of communism saw the beginnings of many local directors’ fruitful careers. Although the political repercussions of the 1968 Soviet invasion would terminate the New Wave, inhibit the possibilities for directors, and prompt several of them to immigrate to the West, the grave consequences could not curtail their creative drives. Some, such as Jiří Menzel (1938–2020) and Věra Chytilová (1929–2014), stayed to endure the repressive normalization period that ensued, while others, such as Miloš Forman (1932–2018) and Ivan Passer (1933–2020), moved to the United States to continue their careers. All four directors studied at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, also known as FAMU, and played prominent roles in the New Wave before continuing to make films from the 1970s into the 2000s. But beyond their initial commonalities, how is it possible to read their extensive, transatlantic oeuvres? How did all four directors employ cinema to express their reactions to the societal environments in which they lived and worked after the 1960s? Moreover, what sorts of parallels exist between their arguably disparate films?To formulate a comparative understanding of the post–New Wave filmographies of Menzel, Chytilová, Forman, and Passer, this article focuses on a specific material motif: the car. Beyond its basic association with transportation, the automobile connotes innumerable factors about existence in modern civilization: position in society, standard of living, terrestrial mobility, and the pursuit of property. In Cold War circumstances, competition between the blocs involved not only grand ideologies in conjunction with government mechanisms, but also denizens’ ways of life, with car availability and ownership serving as a metric for systems’ economic production and consumer standards. Considering cars in filmic texts as indicative of auteurs’ attitudes, this article explores the automotive motif qua societal status, individualism, capability, and space. It interprets directors’ reactions toward stimuli in their host countries’ communities through the ways that vehicles in films exemplify characters’ hierarchical rankings, point to private ownership versus group interests, affect the environments of places, or function as instruments that enable (or hinder) people's actions. All four directors deal with the complexities surrounding the symbolism of individual car ownership as a marker of social ascent and personal success. They also associate their characters with select car models to depict people's experiences with “normal” life in their respective countries, from the middle class in America to communities in late-communist Czechoslovakia.This article investigates the post–New Wave careers of the four filmmakers by discussing how the car functions in works from their individual filmographies and then providing comparative evaluation that accounts for cross-cultural factors. The analysis employs poststructuralist auteur theory, which recognizes that although myriad personalities and factors impact the production of a film, it is ultimately the auteur who commands the work of art—a principle that respects François Truffaut's fundamental premise of considering the director as the product's primary creator (Braudy and Cohen 156). As David Bordwell states, “assumptions about origin-of-the-text authorship are hard to avoid . . . since medieval exegesis, the string of terms auctor, auctoritas, authenticus inevitably linked author, authority, and authenticity” (159). Auteur theory evolved in the 1970s via poststructuralist ideas, which propose that no single theory is wholly sufficient to handle a text and rather stress a plurality of theories and “all relevant discourses (spoken and unspoken) revolving around and within the text,” not to mention historical and cultural contexts (Hayward 35–39). Duly acknowledging that the Czech directors draw inspiration from literature and collaborate with assorted personnel within different localities and political orders, this article elaborates upon directors’ roles as social commentators who respond to evolving spatiotemporal circumstances. Throughout their post–New Wave filmographies, the directors foreground cars in their commentary about discordance between systemic promises and experienced realities as well as how people respond to their positions in social hierarchies.The youngest member of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Jiří Menzel studied at FAMU in the same class as Věra Chytilová. Literary adaptations of Czech texts make up a great deal of Menzel's cinematic contributions, including his version of Bohumil Hrabal's Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966), the New Wave exemplar that won an Academy Award. The author and auteur also collaborated on Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969), a critical portrayal of Stalinist-era forced labor that was banned in Czechoslovakia until 1990. Despite Menzel's claims that his Oscar brought him very little benefit at home—before it simply turned into a taboo topic after the invasion, when he initially experienced blacklisting—the director chose to stay in the country (Buchar 47).Menzel's directorial tendency of interspersing commonplace existential mechanisms with sexual scenes finds its way into his first post–New Wave work, the socialist realist Who Looks for Gold? (Kdo hledá zlaté dno, 1974). Menzel admitted the compromising motives behind directing this piece: “It showed that I had good relations with our people and our Government. Like any moralistic film, it's not a good one” (Markham para. 7). The story begins when the young watchmaker Láďa (Jan Hrušínský) completes his army conscription. His girlfriend, the hairdresser Petra (Jana Giergielová), greets him outside the military camp with her baby blue hatchback. A kinetic ride back to Prague follows, with the couple taking turns driving, continuously kissing and caressing one another. A series of windshield front shots emphasize the couple's delight, including close-ups of their faces that accentuate their mutual affection. Interludes of front-seat views outward and the characters riding through bucolic fields and pine forests enhance emanations of physical momentum at play. Accelerating whirs heighten the sense of movement in this motorized vehicle, which Láďa instinctively brakes when passions grow too heated. Granting them seclusion and authority over their own mode of transport, the car functions not only as a chariot back to the metropolis, but also as a venue for these youths’ romantic activities.The amorous road scene comes off as the most warm-blooded portion of a movie that otherwise largely runs robotic. Láďa takes up employment as a truck driver at a dam construction site. While visiting from Prague, Petra becomes put off by the ruggedness of the proletariat dwellings, such as Láďa's roommate lazing on a cot without removing his soiled rubber boots. Outside on the construction site, her bright blue hatchback contrasts with the visuals of the grandiose infrastructural project, where formworks flank the dirt roads and cranes stretch over the horizon. Petra's car pales physically in comparison to the behemoth Tatra trucks and other utility vehicles that fascinate Láďa, who grows increasingly engaged with the work and the camaraderie between fellow workers. He seemingly changes gears into the direction of the common good, eclipsing his personal pursuits with his Petra, whose selfish agenda manifests during an act of infidelity.The couple eventually breaks up during a stroll through the mammoth construction site with hard-hatted workers in motion. Petra, smartly clad in a white pleated skirt and tall black boots, trails behind Láďa, who sports a loose-fitting laborer's suit. Across the uneven, exposed earth, she exerts physical effort to navigate through upstanding beams, toiling to entice Láďa back to life with her. Petra's suggestions prove moot to the aloof recipient, who replies tersely and commands her to look upward to marvel at a crane dangling a beam structure by the dam's crest. Petra fatefully climbs back into her hatchback and drives away for good. In Who Looks for Gold?, the car takes a journey from a couple's promising reunion to a path of disunion when Láďa emotionally moves on from the vehicle's superficial, self-centered owner.Social status in the day-to-day life under late communism is embedded in Menzel's films in a sardonic manner. In one of these “low-key satires” (as Peter Hames describes in The Czechoslovak New Wave 252), Seclusion Near a Forest (Na samotě u lesa, 1976), cars factor into the farcical elements. The movie's very first scene opens with a close-up of a semaphore's red signal. After the camera tilts downward to catch the green signal, it cuts to the interior of a sedan to introduce the recipient traffic-sitters, the Lavička family: Oldřich (Zdeněk Svěrák), the father figure, behind the wheel; his finicky wife, Věra (Daniela Kolářová), in the passenger seat; and their little son and pigtailed daughter in back. As Oldřich—the paterfamilias aiming to ensure that everything rests under his control—cruises along the city streets, his daughter blurts out, “A titchy Trabant overtook us!” They continue to the next traffic light as the girl keeps an unwavering focus on her father's driving by declaring that two more Trabants have passed them. Oldřich's further efforts to humor his inquisitive son and ignore his cheeky daughter do not deter her from leaning forward to demean him: “You said that no Trabant would ever overtake you, Dad.” Created out of compressed cotton and fiberglass—and deemed as an embodiment of socialist backwardness—the East German Trabant barely lasted in production after the fall of the Berlin Wall (Berdahl 131–32). The nadir of Eastern Bloc car brands becomes an object of lampoon in this scene. Even though the patriarch endeavors to establish a pleasant order in his family unit, an inferior vehicular model surpasses his own.The derided “racing cardboard” again appears in Menzel's work as a key prop in The Snowdrop Festival (Slavnosti sněženek, 1984), a pageant that Daniel Just describes as notably “quotidian” (para. 5). As two characters tinker with a broken-down vehicle on the side of the road, the driver listens to the stories of his ebullient friend, who proclaims himself as a Trabant “expert.” The passenger-cum-mechanical assistant trumpets the reliability of his resilient Trabant after he has driven it into a ditch or worsened its usual stench by cracking two hundred eggs in its interior. Menzel, living in a society doctrinally geared toward eliminating classes and material differences, seemingly takes note of the systemic slips and renders observations in situational narrative ironies. While the private in Who Looks for Gold? stands in opposition to investment in the public good, The Snowdrop Festival acknowledges the normalcy of cars in the daily existence of normalization, incorporating jests about the hierarchy of automobile models within a supposedly leveled society.While The Snowdrop Festival is a Hrabal adaptation that revolves around a village, Seclusion Near a Forest satirizes the normalization-era cliché in which Praguers sought countryside refuge by buying an alternative second dwelling—that is, a chalupa (cottage) or chata (cabin)—as a space to retreat into atomized private life. However, bucolic isolation fails to actualize when the urbanite characters move into old peasants’ dwellings under the impression that the expiring homeowners will die or move away. Instead, they remain on-site. Amplifying the social dilemma is the fact that the country folk take advantage of their tenants’ access to four wheels. Oldřich runs favors for his septuagenarian landlord, Komárek (Josef Kemr), to the point of irking Věra to protest. In Věra's absence, Komárek wakes up Oldřich and his visiting companion one morning by inviting them to a community feast in Ouměřic—a thinly veiled request for a ride. Komárek introduces his “Praguers” to the Ouměřic feasters. The pejorative magnifies with the jeers of an elderly man, soon revealed to be Komárek's ninety-two-year-old father, who points and laughs at the naive guests from the capital. Despite being the driver, Oldřich does not receive respect for his power of personal mobility but rather garners derision for his vulnerability to manipulation. The phenomenon of seeking seclusion becomes fodder for jokes about how city people with their cars get tricked by their simple yet tactical rural counterparts.In Menzel's My Sweet Little Village (Vesničko má středisková, 1985), the town doctor owns a battered old car that he consistently relies on Pávek (Marián Labuda), a local truck driver, to help start. The doctor's pastime of riding alone into the Bohemian countryside while reciting nostalgic poetry gets abridged on different occasions—for instance, when he drives himself off the road or fails to notice his vehicle rolling away while he stares off into the hills. These pickles require that Pávek and his passenger, Otík (János Bán), come to the rescue. The doctor's comical, haphazard style of automobile ownership only accelerates toward the end of the film. Right after he shows his shiny new red Škoda to Pávek and Otík, he proceeds to immediately crash it into a gate. It seems that such a vehicle would connote an ascent in capability, but in this film, it underscores the doctor's characteristic clumsiness.Menzel's playful mockery of the automobile operator coincides with the director's stated affinity for modesty and unpretentious ambitions. The construction of these figures also links to Menzel's expressed perception of the Czech national character as unwarlike, “little and unheroic” (Vidal-Hall 122). This inclination also hints at the director's skepticism toward progress, an outlook he developed due to the ramifications of the Soviet invasion—the thick of which he happened to drive into by car (ČT24). Menzel demarcates August 1968 as the time that deflated his belief that the world was getting better (Buchar 45).1 The director's post–New Wave, village-centric films may thus emanate a longing for simplicity and innocence. Menzel sought to communicate with Czech audiences his filmic lyricism as an antidote to sadness in life (Markham para. 11). The mentioned incidents in Menzel's normalization-era works—ironic Trabant jokes, de facto countryside hierarchies, incompetent dads or professionals behind the wheel—reflect how the director endeavored to sustain the culture through comedy (Vidal-Hall 120).Jiří Menzel's largely localized oeuvre contains period pieces that convey aspects of Czech automotive culture corresponding with historical circumstances. His Hrabal adaptation Cutting It Short (Postřižiny, 1980) takes place around a brewery in a town during the interwar days of the First Czechoslovak Republic. The vogue of celebrating the era's forwardness encompasses welcoming new trends and innovations. One such instance opens with an iris-in on a red and white bouquet behind a pair of upright metal shears. The circle waxes outward to expose the objects’ respective holders: the rotund, bow tie–wearing brewery chair Dr. Gruntorád (Rudolf Hrušínský) commands the scissors; the flowers stand affixed upon an automobile's hood ornament. What quickly becomes clear as a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the novel machine gets underscored by Dr. Gruntorád's announcement: “We hereby cut ourselves off from Old Austria!” Into the sun-bathed brewery courtyard rolls the Czech-made small lorry, its grill emblazoned with “PRAGA,” spurring reactions from the spectators that the beer manufacturer's old-fashioned draft horses should now face slaughter. Menzel appears to paint a romanticized, nostalgic picture of a nascent nation with an industrial spirit upon the company car slated to speed up the distribution rate.Car culture of the interwar era also appears in Menzel's I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2006), his final Hrabal adaptation. The film follows the life of waiter and aspiring hotelier Dítě (Ivan Barnev and Oldřich Kaiser) during the decades surrounding World War II. One of his stints takes place at the sumptuous Hotel Tichota. Dítě compares the property to a fairy tale and praises its orchestration, wherein “someone could suddenly put a coin in and it would begin to play.” The mechanisms of Dítě’s metaphor are evinced when the hotelier, Tichota (Rudolf Hrušínský), a bald, bespectacled man who navigates the grounds by motorized wheelchair, prepares for the guests’ arrival. He meanders about, inspecting the seamlessness of servers’ uniforms, and uses a momentary lull to perform a sniff-test on a vase's floral specimen. A series of soft horn honks spurs Tichota to peer out the window, identify a green convertible pulling around the bend, and blow a whistle for the personnel to assume their roles. Like clockwork, on-site prostitutes powder their faces and pinch up their stockings before arranging themselves around the velvety upholstery, while a white-capped chef scurries about, implicitly to prepare for the glorious feast to come. The scene cuts to an exterior long shot that situates the green convertible parked in front of the hotel's grandiose pseudo-baroque facade. Gleeful piano music plays as a second car appears out of thin air behind its predecessor. Three more cars suddenly appear, consecutively, to form an arch of parallel-parked vehicles. The riders of these chariots are rich industrialists who check into Hotel Tichota to engage in gastronomical and sensual pleasures in addition to performing business deals. The luxurious cars underscore the magical manner in which they arrive at this rarefied place, illustrating their owners’ wealth and societal status in the pre-Munich and, thenceforth, prewar and pre-communist days. Vintage cars factor into Menzel's caricaturized models of Czech historical subjects and contribute to a certain aesthetic of interwar lifestyles shaped by industry. Cutting It Short celebrates a company car for its use on a collective level, while I Served the King of England—which takes place at a later period of the First Republic—employs a critical eye toward notions of the automobile as a marker of individual success.A provocative moralist, Věra Chytilová (1929–2014) directed Czechoslovak New Wave milestones such as the documentary-fiction hybrid Something Different (O něčem jiném, 1963) and the resolutely experimental Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966). Chytilová found herself unable to officially work for seven years after the Prague Spring ended, yet she never opted for emigration. Her works from the 1970s through the 2000s did not attain the experimental caliber of her New Wave works, but they continuously touched on moral themes and societal crises.Věra Chytilová made escapist sex scenes in the car crucial to her first post–New Wave comeback, The Apple Game (Hra o jablko, 1976), a film that she was ultimately allowed to direct after penning her notable open letter “I want work” (1975), in which she described sexism and hypocrisy in the supposedly socialist Czechoslovakia (Chytilová 19). The Apple Game involves the libertine gynecologist Dr. John (Jiří Menzel), an “immoral idiot” whom women love (Andelman para. 19). He carries out an affaire de coeur with his coworker's wife, Marta (Evelyna Steimarová), through regular rendezvous. After awaiting her arrival in central Prague, Dr. John picks up Marta in his little red sedan, and they whisk off into the middle of a residential construction site, snaking through the strewn beams and stacked bricks until they park at a makeshift spot for salacious isolation, Marta all the while fretting about privacy. There is a continuous shot through the rear windshield of the couple in the backseat of his car, where carnality escalates. The camera slowly zooms out to capture a bunch of metal airshafts suspended by a crane. Enter a construction worker, who unhooks the shafts, notices the errant sedan, and inspects the situation. A zoom-in back toward the vehicle's rear sees Dr. John perk up his head; espying the voyeur on the other side of the glass spurs the gynecologist to exit the back seat, throw a brick in the worker's direction, and retreat in embarrassment, zipping up his trousers. Alas, the secret parking spot was not so secret: Dr. John faces an entire posse of men standing there, sneering. Mood killed, Dr. John and Marta quickly peel off back to Prague so that she can return to her matrimonial regularities. Because Dr. John lives with his mother, his car is what provides the opportunity for sexual divertissements removed from his professional and domestic domains.Dr. John and his vehicle enter yet another avenue of sexual exploits after he begins flirting with the young nurse Anna (Dagmar Bláhová). On a cloudy, chilly day, the two of them spontaneously venture off to a country field for fun. Anna giggles as she drags along bundles of gangly dried wood, builds a campfire, and strips herself bare-chested to summon the attention of Dr. John, who has sharpened a branch to impale a stray apple. Secluded, the man and woman make explicit the film's titular meanings as they role-play and chat with the prop of the veritable fruit. However, Anna's sober interjections (responsibility, attachment, consequence) irk Dr. John, who storms off to his sedan, his date trailing behind. He whips the car through the fields, dust clouds pluming rampant, and evades Anna's queries about whether he feels afraid or upset. The driver decisively parks and states, “Here we are,” intending for them to resume their romance. Dr. John's captaining of his vehicle provides him with a means of control in cases when women enervate him.While Dr. John's car serves as a device that enables his toying with women, the grave moral of the story is magnified when matters go awry: Marta gets caught at home, and Anna gets pregnant. Like with the couple in Who Looks for Gold?, the car as an instrument for zestful romantic episodes reaches its limits. It is not in Dr. John's passenger vehicle but rather on a crowded mass-transit train that he and Anna finally talk seriously about building a relationship. He follows her into a train cabin with seating, where he sidles next to an older woman wedged alongside Anna. The intermediary older woman offers Dr. John an apple; truth starts to surface about his ambivalence toward domestic and familial duties. Anna exits the cabin, Dr. John follows, and the two continue their argument into the corridor, announcing their problems aloud to the other riders. Whereas the car had been the technology of casual independence and detachment from accepted life in conservative 1970s Czechoslovakia, the train becomes a stage for the corollary of such antics, transposed to public exposure and scrutiny.Chytilová further rendered the matter of male characters committing immoral sexual acts in cars through her tragicomic Trap, Trap, Little Trap (Pasti, pasti, pastičky, 1998). The film reflects the pervasive “bad mood” of late-1990s Czech society, following the hopeful days after the 1989 peaceful Velvet Revolution transition to democracy, by highlighting how opportunistic corruption in business and politics affects everyday people. A pivotal part of Trap begins when the veterinarian Lenka (Zuzana Stivínová) finds herself stuck on the side of a country road because her old Škoda (a Czech car brand) ran out of gas. Along rolls a flashy yellow Renault convertible captained by Petr (Tomáš Hanák), a designer in advertising, who is accompanied by Dohnal (Miroslav Donutil), a member of Parliament. They eye the stranded Lenka as prey.As Petr inspects Lenka's vehicle, allusions to social stature come out: petr: Great car. It's been around a bit.lenka: It's all I can afford.After he offers her a ride, Lenka enters the passenger seat of Petr's Renault and soon grows uncomfortable due to malicious statements the two men utter (“It's dangerous to take rides from strangers”). They proceed to drive the helpless hitchhiker into the woods to rape her.Several camera angles work to construct this horrific scene with Petr's car as its centerpiece. The frame initially shows the parked convertible's passenger side as Petr constrains Lenka in the seat for Dohnal to rape her with the door ajar. A subsequent shot beholds the driver's side, zeroing in on obscured heads and bodily motions before zigzagging through tree branches and crowns. The tonality of these frames renders some flora forms distinguishable, others abstracted; remaining clear and constant are aggressive male groans and the loud hue of Petr's car. A wandering lens and vantage points from behind bushes effect feelings of anxiety that veer into voyeurism. Enveloped by the woods and flecked by the dappled light, the visuals of the garish Renault jut out jarringly throughout the scene as the aggressors utilize the machine as a weapon. Following the assault, Lenka fakes a faint from which she wakes up and requests that Petr and Dohnal drive her home for a cup of coffee. There, she carries out her masked plan of lacing shots of liquor with sedatives so she can castrate the perpetrators. Petr and Dohnal awake to realize not only their severe surgical punishment, but also that Lenka took off with their transportation. Carless and castrated, Petr and Dohnal have no choice but to hobble to the local transit stop and wait for a bus to pick them up. They ride the bus humiliated, as if everyone is judging them, right until they pass Petr's yellow Renault parked on the side of the road. The men urgently demand that the bus driver stop, and they reprimand him for driving erratically as they disembark. With at least the freedom to resume their own means of travel, Petr and Dohnal feel a base sense of empowerment. They proceed with their lives as eunuchs; Dohnal tries to perpetuate an alibi while Petr periodically tracks down Lenka to harass her. The final scene of the film shows a hysterical Lenka trying to call out her perpetrators in public; however, the system she confronts overpowers her when Dohnal labels her as insane and arranges for an ambulance to rush over and ferry her away.Věra Chytilová’s Panelstory (Panelstory aneb Jak se rodí sídliště, 1979) takes place entirely within Jižní Město, the prefabricated housing complex located in the southeastern outskirts of Prague. The plot revolves around tenants beginning to inhabit units as construction still carries on. Residents of these rectilinear towers fluster over modern amenities that prove unreliable: water taps run dry, elevators get stuck, and wooden planks function as makeshift pathways to front doors. The motley personalities that populate this chaotic ecosystem include an ambivalent pregnant teenager, a squatting mother who exclaims that socialism cannot evict people, and “Grandpa,” an elderly country bumpkin who hopelessly crows about his antediluvian standards. Rather than achieving some form of earthly utopia with shared benefits, the complex ends up functioning as a dystopian amalgam of connivance and complacency, seasoned by skepticism toward fostering social contact.2Several characters who deal with passenger cars in Panelstory expose their egocentric agendas. A resident actor who cannot get his vehicle to start approaches a table of construction workers drinking beers in the canteen. One of the workers asks if the actor has a Saab, likely indicating some interest in the status symbol attached to the brand. When the worker first encounters the actor's yellow Saab 99, he chides that he has seen better. The coxcomb actor, who concedes that he knows nothing about cars and does not wish to get dirty, agrees to his impromptu helper's request of both Russian (Soviet) and Polish vodka. The worker then proceeds to station himself in the driver's seat, reading a newspaper and sipping from a vodka bottle, until the aforementioned elderly resident lumbers by to interrupt him: grandpa: Can't get it to start?worker: That's right, Grandpa.grandpa: If I were you, I'd fix it.It takes barely a minute for the senior to crack open the hood, diagnose a dry part, and prescribe it distilled water, all to the protest of the construction worker. Fixing the vehicle's problem disrupts his lackadaisical flow.The Saab 99 again becomes the node of self-centered tendencies during a subsequent episode when a pregnant tenant goes into labor. The actor and another neighbor, Marie (Eva Kačírková), with whom he started a casual romantic relationship, become involved in emergency efforts to rush the woman to the hospital. After an ambulance arrives, the actor sees her off and then resumes his personal interests—polishing his Saab's windshield and yelling at a construction vehicle in vain. Marie, unaware of the ambulance's arrival, comes running hastily down through the mucky mounds: marie: Is that your car?actor: Sure.marie: Why didn't you offer to drive her?actor: But she could have given birth . . . marie: Aha! You've got new covers. I forgot your love of beauty.The camera shifts away from the torn-up earth to face the Saab's driver-side window, where the glass reflects a white apartment tower jutting into the azure firmament. The visual effect—framing the building's matrix of private units, gated by balustrades of modern-looking porches arrayed in polymeric glory—accompanies the overall change of focus. The presence of the Saab activates the pair's egocentrism within the anonymizing atmosphere of the standardized living spaces.The car becomes a divisive item wi