The films of Jan Němec (b. 1936) occupy a special place in the cinema of the Czechoslovak New Wave, the film movement that began in the early 1960s during a period of new freedom in the State-controlled Czechoslovak film industry. Central to the movement, Němec’s films have a toughness all their own. More clear-eyed, less wistful, and weirder than the films of his compatriots, their sense of freedom amid repression and hope within darkness now appears to have sealed Němec’s fate as much as any overt political provocation did. Poised between the anarchic confrontations of Věra Chytilová and the humanist whimsies of Miloš Forman, Němec’s films are terse and absurd, snatched from real life in a country that no longer exists but whose problems Němec presented as universal. Recent events in Ukraine show they are timely today.

Němec graduated from FAMU, the State film school, after making the remarkable short A Loaf of Bread in 1960, a precursor in theme and subject to his debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, filmed a year later. The Czechoslovak New Wave coalesced around him, along with Jiří Menzel, who directed Closely Watched Trains (1967), Miloš Forman, who quickly made a series films including Black Peter (1964) and Loves of a Blonde (1965), and Ester Krumbachová, a costume designer, screenwriter, and muse figure to the entire movement, who Němec married. Their films, produced at the Barrandov Studios in Prague, won awards at European festivals, including Venice, and were championed in France. They played in the US and won foreign film Oscars in Hollywood, where several key figures, including Němec, eventually relocated after the Soviet crackdown following the Prague Spring in 1968. 

Němec’s body of work from the “Golden Sixties” consists of two shorts, a sketch for an omnibus film, three short features, and a newsreel smuggled out of Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion. Their total running time is not much longer than Andrei Rublev  but they reveal a talent as distinct as any that emerged from Eastern Europe in the 1960s. After Diamonds of the Night established Němec at the forefront of the New Wave, his follow-up feature, A Report on the Party and the Guests, was banned “forever” by the State, one of a handful of Czechoslovak films accorded that honor. Němec and Krumbachová made Martyrs of Love the same year, a surreal depiction of thwarted love under bureaucratic control, but the ban on their previous film and the Soviet invasion effectively ended Němec’s career as a Czechoslovak filmmaker, cutting him short in his early thirties. 

He left Czechoslovakia soon after, and continued to make films in Europe, mostly outside official film industries. Unlike Forman, Němec was not able to gain a foothold in Hollywood. He worked in the US and elsewhere as a professional wedding videographer, and since the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in 1989, has made features and documentaries in the Czech Republic. Němec’s enforced silence and marginalization under both communism and capitalism highlight the problems of an artist caught between two worlds, a situation that mirrors his country’s at the time of the New Wave he created and shaped into being. – A. S. Hamrah, film editor and film critic, N1FR, n+1’s film review