Posts Tagged ‘Jiří Menzel’
Seclusion Near a Forest
Na samotě u lesa Czechoslovakia, 1976, colour, 93 minsFirst of all, some much-needed context. Seclusion Near a Forest (also known as A Cottage by the Wood, though the former title is closer to the original) was the second film that Jiří Menzel made after a five-year ban following the reception of Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti, 1969), [...]
Czech cinema in November
Thanks to an upcoming Riverside Studios Cinema season of the films of Jan and Zdeněk Svěrák, and the imminent release of the first English-subtitled DVD of Jiri Menzel's I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), I've decided to devote much of November to exploring the work of the two most internationally [...]
Irony Man
It's dated yesterday, but I don't think it ever made it into the printed version of the Guardian, which is why I didn't spot it until now. Anyway, here's an excellent interview with Jiří Menzel as his latest film I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007) finally gets a belated and brief British cinema run.
Catching up
Apologies for the apparent lack of activity over the past few days: I've spent them preparing the various multimedia elements of my talk Andrzej Wajda: An Introduction, which I'll be presenting at the BFI Southbank tonight at 6.15 - and, as ever, these things take much longer than expected!Polish Radio recently interviewed me about the Wajda [...]
Jiří Menzel in London
Last Sunday saw the Barbican's London premiere (and only the second UK screening) of Jiří Menzel's I Served the King of England (Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále, 2007), his sixth adaptation of the work of the great Czech writer and eccentric Bohumil Hrabal following his contribution to the anthology Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně, [...]
Censorship as a Creative Force: Screentalk
Last night I attended the keenly-awaited Censorship as a Creative Force Screentalk discussion at London's Barbican Arts Centre, in which Jiří Menzel, István Szabó and Agnieszka Holland (an eleventh-hour replacement for Andrzej Wajda) discussed their experience of censorship under the various totalitarian régimes under which they had to spend [...]
Censorship as a Creative Force
In late April, the Barbican Arts Centre in London is hosting a week-long season, Censorship as a Creative Force, in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute, the Czech Centre and the Hungarian Cultural Centre.I've already booked tickets for the two highlights - a panel discussion on April 25 with the extraordinarily impressive line-up of [...]
Derek Malcolm’s Century of Cinema
While researching something else (as is always the way), I stumbled upon former Guardian critic Derek Malcolm's A Century of Films - a survey of his personal Top 100, with a robust defence of each film's inclusion. And on glancing down the list again for the first time since 2001, I notice that nine of his choices came from central and eastern [...]
My Sweet Little Village
Vesničko má středisková Czechoslovakia, 1985, colour, 100 mins A gigantic box-office hit on its original release (5 million tickets sold in a country whose population wasn't much more than double that), Jiří Menzel's gently subversive comedy My Sweet Little Village is clearly regarded with immense and continuing affection in the Czech [...]
Jiří Menzel on DVD
Going from private e-mail, last week's Kieślowski DVD survey seemed to have gone down pretty well - so here's a similar overview of Jiří Menzel's output. Unlike the situation with Kieślowski, if you aren't familiar with the Czech DVD market you could be forgiven for thinking that there's next to nothing available besides the inevitable [...]