Alle guten Landsleute

Although I was unaware of the name, Vlastimil Brodsky, I recognised the face immediately from his obituary photograph in a newspaper the other day, a face as distinctive and unforgettable as that of Louis Jouvet or Michel Simon. Brodsky brought distinction to a number of fine Czech films particularly in the '60's. but it is his performance of Ocenas, the organist in Vojtech Jasny's "All My Good Countrymen", that I remember most. The obituary prompted me to take another look at this fine cinematic product of the Prague Spring. Unfortunately it followed the fate of two other politically liberating films of the period, "Funeral Ceremony" and "The Ear", by being banned during the years of repression that followed, only to resurface with the collapse of communism. Their rediscovery was one of the most important cinematic events in recent years. The title "All My Good Countrymen" is not without irony as this epic tale of Czech village life from shortly after the end of the second world war concentrates on the activities of a group of friends who are not beyond reproach in siding with a politically corrupt regime for material advancement. Are these the "good countrymen" of the title or does it refer to the rest of the village who scorn these petty authority figure with silent contempt? By portraying the friends sometimes with quirky affection and sometimes as petty bullies, the director displays a certain moral ambiguity that makes one feel that the message behind it all has not quite been fully thought out. Another area of puzzlement is the three strange deaths that punctuate the narrative flow. They have an almost dreamlike quality, but, powerful as they are, their significance is not entirely clear. Where the film wholly succeeds however is in its wonderful evocation of time and place. The passing of seasons, particularly winter landscapes, have a beauty that is quite breathtaking. The symphonic score by Svatopluk Havelka, a rich tapestry of ostinato figures, beautifully compliments these landscape interludes while an unaccompanied trombone solo highlights the three moments of death. But it would be wrong to give the impression that "All My Good Countrymen" is a film where style matters more than substance. The use of a silent village crone, generally seen in closeup at moments of crucial drama, brilliantly sums up the stupidity of so many of the main characters' actions - an inspired use of a type of wordless Greek Chorus. In fact the film is often at its most powerful when it uses silence. Note the wonderfully poignant use of gesture when the honest young farmer takes leave of his family on his arrest. It is at moments such as this that the film achieves greatness.

Satantango is my all-time favorite movie. It's about a small town and the dissolution of its collectivized farm after the end of communism. All My Good Countrymen (the title on my DVD, though listed on IMDb as All My Compatriots) is about a similar small town, but it's about the period of collectivization instead of de-collectivization. In All My Compatriots, there is a steady demoralization of the townspeople as the collectivization and politicization moves along from 1945 to 1958. If you follow that trajectory until the collapse of the Soviet Union, you get to the lethargic, soul-destroyed nadir from which Satantango begins. Even though All My Compatriots is about a Czech town, and Satantango takes place in Hungary, it's remarkable how similar the towns feel and how much the one movie feels like the continuation of the other.

While Satantango is an unusually long movie (over 7 hours!), it felt like it moved along a lot faster than Compatriots. (Satantango isn't fast-paced by any means; but time goes by faster than in Compatriots because it manages to mesmerize in a way Compatriots does not.) Besides its slowness, Compatriots was also rather hard to follow. Nonetheless, Compatriots had a quirky quality I liked, and it's especially interesting as a movie made during the Prague Spring. Also, the town and landscape had a delightful Brueghel-like quality, and many of the faces made me feel like Fellini had managed to slip into Eastern Europe to shoot the close-ups.

I think that, unlike common propaganda, where things are more black and white, good and bad, 'All My Good Countrymen' illustrates where real people, that are just like the rest of us (more or less), are capable of being very unjust and inhumane, when using the excuse of supposedly working to benefit "the people", and especially when given ultimate power over others. The most common human motivation is greed/selfishness. In a "free enterprise" model, those motivations can be turned into positives, because someone with those motives often is willing to work very hard to achieve his desires, and the increased production is a benefit to society (assuming that the proper laws are in place eliminate the worst abuses and corruptions of capitalism). Under Communism, the will to produce is stunted via collectivization, because the fruits of your labor are taken from you without recompense. The peasant and serf labor was in for a big surprise. The only way to success was through politics (not through hard work or skilled labor). The Agitators, Commissars, Bureaucrats and Apparatchiks reaped the benefits of your hard work, and were much harder taskmasters that the old landowners. As shown in this film, the small independent farmers had it the worst of all, because everything they had was taken from them via collectivization, then they were forced to produce as before, but without gaining the benefits of their labor. The "agitators" portrayed in 'All My Good Countrymen' never do anything but complain and steal what others have accomplished by hard work. It has been said "You have to break some eggs to make an omelet", but as this film shows, it's your eggs, but it's their omelet.

Many people considered Stalin to be a Hero and a fine fellow, with a great sense of humor. Of course, we don't know what they thought when Stalin had them all shot six months later.

This may not be a good place to start to enjoy Czech film - there are more accessible New Wave films - but it is a very powerful film which should not be missed by anybody who has more than a passing familiarity with the country and its history. With actors such as Radoslav Brzobohatý, Vladimír Menšík, a young Jíří Kodet, and the ever-popular singer and actor Waldemar Matuška, the film has a first-rate cast. In Jaroslav Kučera, it had a great cinematographer. Jasný was by now an accomplished screenwriter and, the countryside of the Pardubice region was as beautiful a backdrop as the machinations of the early communist period and, in particularly, the collectivisation of agriculture, were a fascinating subject. Still, the excellence of the film was not a given. The structure, given in large part by alternating dramatic changes of the environment as the seasons change and those first years after the communist takeover roll on, is effective and well-paced and permits a continuity of tone and subject with certain more episodic elements. The plot, on the page, might come across as busy, but on the screen, there is plenty of breathing space, and room for exquisite shots of the countryside, of work, even of play. So too does the heroic refusal to compromise of one of the characters, František, which becomes of increasing importance as the film moves into the mid 1950s, do nothing to detract from the well-balanced portrayal of the various characters of the village, described and referred to by their silly nicknames from the opening scenes in the months after the war. The history and fates of these characters are handled deftly, often with a brevity and telling detail of a John Cheever story. Neither is the film as unremittingly brutal as others handling similar material, such as the excellent, and thematically similar Smuteční slavnost of the following year. Like that film, I hope to return to Všichni dobří rodáci many times yet, and am sure it will repay repeated viewing.

Possibly the most famous work of the nonagenarian Czech filmmaker Vojtech Jasný, ALL MY COMPATRIOTS is a trenchant allegory of life under the Communist regime, shot with sublime bucolic élan and fairly won him the BEST DIRECTOR honor in Cannes.

Inhabited in an idyllic Moravian village, this close-knit community Jasný rounds up is particularly male-oriented, a patriarchal microcosm where the fate of ordinary lives is steered by an intangible hand. From the film's time span (1945 to 1958), inhabitants are divided by political views, tormented by past deeds, succumbed to ludicrous idiocy or outrageous hatred, united behind one good guy but also crumbled when things become menacing. Overall, Jasný manages to flesh out a vivid smorgasbord of characters living under shifting sands with none-too-heavy-handed snippets center on their objects: a four-square peasant (Brzobohatý, full of fortitude), a shifty photographer, a guilt-ridden drunkard (Matuska, strikingly entrancing), a displaced organist, a cleft-lipped thief, an ill-fated postman among others; whereas in the petticoat front, we have a running gag of a jinxed merry widow, whoever dares to court her would be pretty soon pushing up daisies.

But, the film's strength and value does not reside in the circumspect plot construction, because Jasný doesn't offer a rounded inspection of the state of affairs, most of the time, audience are passive witnesses of the unjust happenings but barring from peering into the machinations behind those (Communist) persecutors and connivers (they are all schematically depicted as surly pawns), thus it manifests that Jasný's standing point might not be entirely objective, it has Jasný's autobiographic influence notwithstanding, but no more a convincing censure of the regime than a frank rumination of an existential philosophy and his unbiased view of the hoi-polloi (both affectionate and matter-of-fact).

Actually what makes this film a marvel to any new audience is its ethnographic portrait of the place and its people, Jasný has an extremely keen eye on faces and lights, the portraitures he captures are magnificent to say the very least (particularly the furrowed visages of the elderly), and sonically, its nostalgic soundtrack (organ pieces, lyrical strains) and diegetic music sequences serve as excellent ballast to those indelible images, somehow, the film is sublimed itself into something might surpass even Jasný's intention, something should be enshrined as an ardent reportage of its locus and time, a deathless enterprise finds its solid toehold amongst a vastly manifold Czechoslovakian cinema.