Saturday | April 19, 2014 7:00 pm

A Report on the Party and the Guests
(O slavnosti a hostech)

Screening on Film

Directed by Jan Němec.
With Ivan Vyskočil, Jan Klusák, Evald Schorm.
Czechoslovakia, 1966, 35mm, black & white, 70 min.
Czech with English subtitles.

The film the Czechoslovak authorities banned forever combines the pressure of authority with a picnic on the grass. A group of day-trippers are confronted by a smug man in tweed knickerbockers who begins to casually harass them. When they resist, the man calls on a phalanx of thugs to rough them up. Another man appears, reveals himself as their leader, and stops the beating, politely insisting the picnickers accompany him to a banquet in the woods. The story echoes Němec’s previous feature, but in reverse. Instead of running through the woods from their captors, these prisoners are politely led to a party in their honor. Soon they begin to jockey for position and favor. When it was released in the US, Renata Adler called A Report on the Party and the Guests one of the ten best films of the year, noting its “peculiar combination of humor and a chill."

PRECEDED BY

Oratorio for Prague (Oratorio for Prague)

Directed by Jan Němec.
Czechoslovakia, 1968, digital video, black & white, 29 min.
English.

Němec shot this newsreel during the Prague Spring of mid-1968 and captured on film the Soviet invasion that August. Smuggled out of Czechoslovakia and shown to the world, this is the primary filmed record of those events. French filmmaker Claude Berri produced this version, narrated in the Bronx-accented tones of Gene Moskowitz, Variety’s Paris correspondent. What begins as a hopeful report on the flower children of Prague as they peacefully demonstrate in public squares, paint their faces and gather in churches and synagogues to hold vigils and speak to the People, turns bloody when Soviet troops arrive to occupy Prague and shut down Alexander Dubček’s government. The film ends in death and funerals. Before that, Němec takes us to a mod fashion show and a dance party, as Czechoslovakia freely participates in the swinging ‘60s for the first and last time.