Recommended Books & Films

Films

Czech filmmaking has a long tradition. The Prague studios in the Barrandov Hills churned out glossy pre-Communist romantic comedies and period pieces rivaling the output of Paris, Berlin, and even Hollywood at the time.

While Czech literature and music have carved their places in classical culture, the country's films and their directors have collected the widest praise in the mid- to late 20th century. Cunning, melancholy views of Bohemian life (before the Soviets moved in for a few decades) were captured by some of the finest filmmakers in the era known as the Czech New Wave of the 1960s.

Directors Jirí Menzel and Milos Forman were in the vanguard. An easy-to-find example of this period's work (with English subtitles) is Menzel's Oscar-winning Closely Watched Trains, a snapshot of the odd routine at a rural Czech train station.

Forman made his splash with a quirky look at a night in the life of a town trying to have fun despite itself. The Fireman's Ball shows Forman's true mastery as he captures the essence of being stone-bored in a gray world, yet he still makes it strangely intriguing. Of course, this was made before Forman emigrated to the big budgets of Hollywood and first shocked Americans with Hair. He then directed the Oscar-winning One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. For Amadeus, Forman sought authenticity, so he received special permission from the Communists to return to Prague; while filming, he brought back to life the original Estates' Theater (Stavovské divadlo), where Mozart first performed. Forman also consulted a friend, then-President Václav Havel, before choosing Courtney Love as the pornographer's wife in the Oscar-nominated The People vs. Larry Flynt. Havel loved the choice but refused to attend a private 1996 screening in Prague along with Flynt himself.

Czech-based directors after the New Wave mostly disappeared from view, but one stunningly brave film was made in 1970, as the repressive post-invasion period known as normalization began its long, cold freeze of talent. In The Ear (Ucho), director Karel Kachyna presents the anguished story of a man trapped in an apartment wired for sound, subject to the Communist leaders' obsession and paranoia with Moscow. That The Ear was made in the political environment of the time was astounding. That it was quickly banned wasn't. Fortunately, local TV has dusted off copies from the archives, and it has begun playing to art-house audiences again.

But maybe a new Czech wave has begun. The father-and-son team of Zdenek and Jan Sverák won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1997 for Kolja, the bittersweet tale of an abandoned Russian boy grudgingly adopted by an aging Czech bachelor on the cusp of the 1989 revolution. After a previous Oscar nomination for the 1992 Elementary School (Obecná skola), the 30-something director Jan and his actor father are making an industry out of golden reflections about Czech life.

Prague has become a popular location for major motion pictures, in spite of itself. Producer/actor Tom Cruise and director Brian De Palma chose it for the stunning night shots around Charles Bridge in the early scenes of Mission: Impossible. During shooting, a verbal brawl broke out with Czech officials, who jacked up the rent for use of the riverside palace that acts as the American Embassy in the film (the palace is actually claimed by the von Liechtenstein family). Immortal Beloved, a story of Beethoven, made use of Prague's timeless streets (shooting around the graffiti).

Finally, The Beautician and the Beast, starring "Bond" hunk Timothy Dalton and nasal-siren Fran Drescher, uses Prague as a mythical East European capital invaded by a Brooklyn hairdresser (who makes pretty good use of her Frommer's guidebook while traveling through faux-Prague).

Still, the film about Prague probably most familiar to American audiences is The Unbearable Lightness of Being, based on the book by émigré author Milan Kundera. Set in the days surrounding the Soviet invasion, the story draws on the psychology of three Czechs who can't escape their personal obsessions while the political world outside collapses around them. Many Czechs find the film disturbing, some because it hits home, others because they say it portrays a Western stereotype.

Books

Any discussion of Czech literature with visiting foreigners usually begins with Milan Kundera. Reviled among many Czechs who didn't emigrate, Kundera creates a visceral, personal sense of the world he chose to leave in the 1970s for the freedom of Paris. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the anguish over escaping the Soviet-occupied Prague he loves tears the libidinous protagonist Dr. Tomás in the same way the love for his wife and the lust for his lover does. More Czech post-normalization angst can be found in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Laughable Loves. Kundera's biting satire of Stalinist purges in the 1950s The Joke, however, is regarded by Czech critics as his best work.

Arnost Lustig, a survivor of the Nazi-era Terezín concentration camp and author of many works, including Street of Lost Brothers, shared the 1991 Publishers Weekly Award for best literary work with John Updike and Norman Mailer. In 1995, he became the editor of the Czech edition of Playboy.

The best work of renowned Ivan Klíma, also a survivor of Terezín, is translated as Judge on Trial, a study of justice and the death penalty.

Jaroslav Hasek wrote the Czech harbinger to Forrest Gump in The Good Soldier svejk, a post-World War I satire about a simpleton soldier who wreaks havoc in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war.

Bohumil Hrabal, noted for writing about the Czech Everyman and maybe the country's all-time favorite author, died in early 1997 when he fell (so they said officially) out of a fifth-story window while trying to feed pigeons. His death was eerily similar to the fate of a character in one of his stories. He had two internationally acclaimed hits: Closely Watched Trains (also translated as Closely Observed Trains, on which the Menzel film was based), and I Served the King of England. When then-President Bill Clinton visited Prague in 1994, he asked to have a beer with Hrabal in the author's favorite Old Town haunt, the pub U Zlatého tygra (At the Golden Tiger). Clinton may have gotten more than he bargained for, as the gruff but lovable Hrabal, who turned 80 that year, lectured the president on his views of the world.

No reading list would be complete without reference to Franz Kafka, Prague's most famous novelist, who wrote his originals in his native German. The Collected Novels of Franz Kafka, which includes The Castle and The Trial, binds his most claustrophobic works into a single volume.

If it's contemporary philosophy you want, there is, of course, the philosopher ex-president. Václav Havel's heralded dissident essay, "The Power of the Powerless, " explained how the lethargic masses were allowing their complacency with communism to sap their souls. His "Letters to Olga," written to his wife while in prison in the 1980s, takes you into his cell and his view of a moral world. Available are two solid English-translated compilations of his dissident writings: Living in Truth and Open Letters. Disturbing the Peace is an autobiographical meditation on childhood, the events of 1968, and Havel's involvement with Charter 77. His first recollections about entering politics are in "Summer Meditations, " a long essay written during a vacation.

While he hasn't had much time to write since his presidency, Havel says that his speeches given around the world each continue a dialogue about morality in politics. If you read the anthology of his presidential speeches, Toward a Civil Society, you'll find it clear that Havel hasn't stopped being the dissident. However, now his target is incompetence and corruption in politics and society, including in democracies.

Madeleine Albright's father, diplomat Dr. Josef Koerbel, wrote a definitive contemporary history of his homeland in his final book, Twentieth Century Czechoslovakia, before his death in 1977. More than an academic study, it reads as a personal memoir of Prague's chaotic events, many of which he witnessed.

Finally, for an epic intellectual tour of the long, colorful, and often tragic history of the city, try the 1997 release of Prague in Black and Gold by native son and Yale literature professor Peter Demetz.