BD 31 CzechMate: In Search of Jiří Menzel

[Bikey]

Jonathan Rosenbaum choses Shivendra Singh Dungarpur's "Masterful and enlightening" CZECHMATE as one of his latest 'Global Discoveries' at Cinema Scope

[Bikey]

"Dungarpar's cross cutting between both contemporary and archival interviews, as well as the really brilliant montages featuring a panoply of fascinating looking Czech films, consistently helps to keep interest high despite the documentary's length... Highly recommended."

A terrific review of CZECHMATE at Blu-ray.com

[Bikey]

Lowest price yet for one of the the best discs of 2020... CZECHMATE is just £14.99 at Amazon UK

[Ribs]

Just a quick word in to say like Celluloid Man this is an extraordinarily rich work of pure love for its subject. It’s so fascinating to me that despite the desire to focus on Menzel’s films, Dungarpur just cannot help but to have exploded this film into a general lovefest for so many filmmakers and films of the period, both known and unknown. This is because despite repeated denial of being any real “movement” every single person interviewed can’t help but go person by person and film by film to identify this key work or this inspiration even though they are ostensibly only being asked about Menzel, their enthusiasm for these subjects so infectious the entire movie became supersized to fit it. And to see all these wonderful clips in HD quality - just wonderful. Plus I loved seeing Istvan Szabo and Jiri Menzel together, who I remember having read or heard formed a bit of a trifecta with Makavejev and would be almost inseperable at EFA or similar gatherings.

[MichaelB]

Perhaps the most telling illustration of this is the surprising amount of attention paid to Slovak cinema, which is pretty much irrelevant to Menzel’s robustly Czech output. But if your interviewees include the likes of Eduard Grečner, Dušan Hanák, Juraj Jakubisko, etc, why not indulge yourself?

(And, without wishing to be morbid, the number of the film’s interviewees who have since died is far from insignificant, making this level of detail all the more valuable.)

[Langland]

If anyone is interested Trigon film have a box set of Menzel in their July sale, 30% off. Those Wonderful Movie Cranks, Shortcuts and Seclusion near a Forest. I only know the Movie Cranks with the ubiquitous Rudolf Hrušinsky but that in itself is worth the price of admission.

[jbeall]

This documentary is really a must for any cinephile. (And yet again a reminder that cinephiles are a transnational bunch!)

The entire package is terrific; I'm thinking here of Dungarpur's production diary in the booklet. For example, his description of the difficulty in securing an interview with the Czech New Wave's enfant terrible and Second Run darling Jan Nemec.

And of course, this footage is all the more important since so many of the relevant figures have passed.

When I finally finished Dungarpur's documentary this morning, I pulled all the Czech and Slovak films off my shelves, stacked them by release date, and plan to (re-)watch them during my Xmas break. I can't recommend this documentary enough.

[knives]

I’ve been using this as a class in its subject watching the films as they’ve been mentioned so it’s taken me about a year to finish the film. Dungarpur‘s efforts beg comparison to Brownlow’s Hollywood and it’s just as essential although through a different methodology. Brownlow made an epic with an epic scope whereas Dungarpur says this is an epic topic and goes smaller and smaller till he gets to something that kind of can be touched upon in seven and a half hour span. This is clear with how Forman is integrated in terms of how Menzel relates to him rather than standing on his own. That contextualizing of Menzel is the method throughout hence Vavra getting such a thorough breakdown (ten films referred to in some way) versus Kachyňa at three. The overwhelming effect of this is developing such an awareness of how small a taste this is and wanting another 75 hours of material.

Now just for someone to release Dungarpur‘s The Immortals.

[MichaelB]

Otkar Vávra was an incalculably important figure to that whole generation of Czech filmmakers, as he was the FAMU tutor who encouraged the kind of creative experiments that would ultimately spill over into their public work.

[knives]

Yes, I was alluding to that.