Monday, June 6, 2016

Film Essay: I Served the King of England, Jiri Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal

I Served the King of England, Jiri Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal

 

 

At the end of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel, I served the King of England, the hero Ditie (Czech – diti means "child"), contemplates burial at the very summit of local peak in the European continental divide:

I wanted to be a world citizen after death with one half of me going down the Vlatava into the Laba and on into the North Sea and the other half via the Danube into the Black Sea and eventually the Atlantic.

In an essay on Hrabal, the critic James Wood cites this passage as evidence of a characteristic of the Czech imagination – the desire to be both intensely parochial and true to the geography and unique history of Czech Bohemia as well as the contradictory aspiration to perform on the great international stage.

In Too Loud a Solitude, said to be Hrabal’s best novel, the narrator Hanta works at a garbage dump operating a trash compactor. Hanta preserves books that he admires from destruction. The novel is an extended soliloquy and ends with a thousand-word sentence that contains the phrase: What is down is up and what is up is down. This assertion could be an epigraph to the topsy-turvy world presented in I served the King of England.

Hrabal’s career as the most important Czech writer remaining in his native country is inextricably linked to the work of Jiri Menzel, one of Czechoslovakia’s best known film makers. Hrabal and Menzel worked closely on the script of Closely Watched Trains (1966), a film based on the author’s novel and the winner of an Academy Award in 1968 for Best Foreign Picture. Menzel’s first commercial film, a segment called "Pearls of the Deep" (1964) for an omnibus movie is based on a short story by Hrabal. Menzel collaborated with Hrabal again in adapting a series of short stories into the film Larks on a String. This picture was completed in 1968, a time that coincided with the Soviet crack-down on Eastern Bloc nations – as a result both Hrabal’s anthology of short stories and Larks on a String were suppressed and not commercially released until 1990. After 1970, all of Hrabal’s books were censored. This censorship was ineffective. Samizdat editions of the writer’s novels were in wide circulation and the expatriate Czech novelist, Josef Skvorecky, then-living in Toronto, published each of Hrabal’s books in their original language in Canada during the decade of the seventies. Hrabal was prolific writer – his works run to 19 hefty volumes in the collected edition issued after his death in 1997.

Hrabal’s novel Cutting it Short, about a Czech brewery, was made into a movie by Menzel in 1980. Another Menzel comedy based on a Hrabal novel, The Snowdrop Factory, about life in small town catering to the tourist trade, was produced in 1984. This was followed by Menzel’s 1985 adaptation of Hrabal’s book My Sweet Little Village, the most popular Czech film ever produced.

In the eighties and nineties, Hrabal himself appeared frequently on Tv and in films – he had an important role as an amiable psychiatrist in the Czech TV show Hospuda ("The Pub"), apparently a knock-off of the American series Cheers. Hrabal often uses an elaborate and baroque prose-style, two of his novels consist of a single vastly engorged sentence. He was an important influence both Ivan Klima and the much more famous expatriate Czech writer, Milan Kundera – Hrabel was a generation older than Kundera. Kundera praises Hrabal’s ability to combine the baroque and surreal with a warm depiction of everyday life. Hrabal’s books are described as picaresque novels with effects that may be characterized as "magical realist." I served the King of England, at about 300 pages, is one of Hrabal’s longer novels – it was written in 1970, but could not be published in Czechoslovakia. Nonetheless, the novel circulated in the Canadian edition published by Skvorecky and in "secret anti-Communist" editions and was well-known to Czech literati.

From its first Samizdat publication, Menzel wanted to adapt the novel into a film. After the collapse of Communism, Menzel had some difficulty navigating the commercial film production system. Here is an Eastern bloc paradox – the most difficult, politically problematic films were readily produced in the Soviet Union and its satellite countries; money was available for such movies and they were duly made, then, censored into oblivion and shelved; it seems almost as if the production of politically subversive films was a kind of safety valve to the repressive system – you could make the movie, but the authorities didn’t have to release it. By contrast, no money is even available for political challenging films in the capitalist system. Thus, the paradox: people like Menzel, Tarkovsky, and German could make politically challenging films, they just couldn’t show them publicly; in the market system, these film makers weren’t even able to get their films produced. At a film festival in Karlovy in Eastern Europe, Menzel learned that his producer at Prague’s legendary Barradnov Studios had sold the film rights in Hrabal’s I Served the King of England to another competing production company. Menzel was so outraged that he attacked the film executive, beating him with a big stick. Later, Barrandov Studios was able to re-capture the rights to the picture so that Menzel could produce the picture. The stick that Menzel used to attack the film executive was auctioned off to raise money for the picture.

Menzel’s version of I Served the King of England was released in 2008. The film was nominated for an Academy Award but did not win. (This was Menzel’s third nomination for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film – he won in 1968 for Closely Watched Trains and was nominated as well for My Sweet Little Village in 1986).

Bohumil Hrabal had been dead for eleven years when I served the King of England was first shown to paying audiences. In a number of his books, Hrabal stated his opinion that the best way to commit suicide was by throwing oneself from a warm and cozy apartment on the fifth floor. A fall from that height would reliably kill instantaneously but would not create a great deal of gory mess. In 1997, Hrabal fell from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment in Prague. It is said, however, by witnesses that the old man was trying to feed the pigeons, lost his balance, and fell to his death.

Menzel, now 79, continues to work extensively in the Czech film industry. His eight-part film The Skirt Chasers (2013) was nominated for a number of international awards, but, ultimately, disqualified because the production was made for, and first broadcast on, television. He is married to one of the producers who worked on I Served the King of England, Olga Menzelova-Kelymanok, a glamorous blonde who seems to be about 30 years old. (There are several wonderful images of Menzel – in one picture taken at the Berlinale, we see the gnome-like Menzel peering at the camera from a location that is literally between the breasts of two starlets wearing very low-cut gowns – one of the women is apparently his wife; in the other image on You-Tube, a pretty female interviewer, also about 30 years old, lays sprawled in bed with Menzel where she interviews him.) In his 28 films, Menzel embodies the Czech spirit of carnal sensuousness, a playful and subversive attitude toward sex that ranks love affairs as events of importance equivalent to the world-historical movement of armies and battles fought between nations. The Czech sensibility is anti-heroic, summed up in a line from Closely Watched Trains – after some German trains are blown-up, a characters proclaims that the world would be a better place if everyone "just stayed home on their arses." Human motivation is sordid – Menzel focuses on greed and lust as the impulses driving most human action. Menzel is not judgmental, however -- in his hierarchy of sins, greed and lust are petty compared with the more terrible crimes committed by idealists in the name of politics. The Czechs, who have been the victim of idealistic, world-changing ideologies, have earned the right to their cynicism. Note that, although Menzel depicts, with great tact and horrible objectivity, the execution of some young Czech partisans, this sequence occurs in the context of the hero’s inability to successfully masturbate to climax – an incapacity afflicting our hero because he is listening to one of Hitler’s speeches on the radio. Furthermore, the characteristic violent gesture in I Served the King of England is someone pouring food or beverage over someone else’s head, an indignity that is more slapstick than anything else.

 


The garlanded pubis
From a poem by Thomas Campion:


The peacefull westerne winde,

The winter storms hath tam’d,

And nature in each kinde

The kinde heat hat inflam’d.

The forward buds so sweetly breathe

Out of their earthly bowers,

That heav’n, which viewes their pompe beneath

Would faine be deckt with flowers.
Ditie impresses his girl-friends by covering their naked bodies with flowers. This quirk seems to please his lovers immeasurably. Ditie drapes the German phy-ed teachers groin with spruce needles. (In the novel, there is an extensive and pleasantly pornograpic account of how these spruce needles get in the way and end up in both lover’s mouths.)

How should we take this motif? Clearly, it is important to both Menzel and Hrabal. What does this mean?

 


Differences between novel and film version
The novel is darker in tone than the movie version of I Served the King of England. In the novel, Ditie narrowly escapes committing suicide when he is wrongfully accused of stealing a gold spoon – he goes into the woods to hang himself but is scared away after encountering the corpse of another suicide. At the end of the book, Ditie works as a road repairer in a remote part of the country. (The motif of the German village from which all ethnic Germans have been cleansed, integral to the movie, is not a central theme in the novel – although the depopulated regions around the border are important in the book’s final recuperation of Ditie.) In the novel, Ditie and his German wife have a child. But the baby, although blessed with "perfect Aryan genes", is born retarded and, as he grows up, spends his time hammering nails into the floor of Ditie’s apartment.

In some ways, I Served the King of England, is similar to be both Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Schweik and Guenter Grass’ Danzig trilogy – the books offer a "worm’s eye view of history". Ditie experiences history not as a series of great political events, but instead as picaresque episodes in the life of a roguish bell-boy who later becomes a millionaire. Ditie’s main concern is seducing women. Nonetheless, the Zelig-like Ditie meets famous people during his varied career – in the novel, he spends time with Tomas Masaryk, the founder of the Czech republic between the wars (characteristically, Ditie sees him with his French lover) at a hotel where he is working. He also meets the American author, John Steinbeck.

Hrabal is clearly a magisterial prose stylist. He works in long sentences that wander associatively from one topic to another. I Served the King of England is constructed in massive blocks of prose and resembles, superficially at least, the work of the great Hungarian novelist, Laszlo Kraznahorkai (as well as Gyorgy Konrad the author of The Social Worker) – although Hrabal’s subject matter is brighter and, of course, substantially more hedonistic. (There is sex or a naked woman on just about every page of the novel and Hrabal describes the various nude women and their sexual encounters with a connoisseur’s practiced eye.) There is an intense joi d’vivre in the novel that wars with aspects of the book that are indisputably melancholy. From the perspective of the little man, like Ditie or the good soldier Schweik, what is important in life is women, sex, and food – everything else is politics and politics is bad for the soul. Hrabal’s Slavic melancholy captures the last forty pages of the novel – near the end of the book, Ditie retreats into the wilderness with a German shepherd dog, a goat, a pony, and a skittish cat. Avoiding human contact, Ditie broods on his life and, ultimately, becomes a kind of ascetic saint. In essence, he renounces human society as fundamentally corrupt and withdraws into a world of literature – at the end of the novel, we see Ditie beginning work on the memoir that will become I Served the King of England. (In this part of the novel, the action is all internal to Ditie and, so, this part of the book is not well-served by Menzel’s film.)

 


Sudetenland
Czechoslovakia was a nation-state that arose in the wake of the Great War and the German defeat in 1918. The country was carved out of territory that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Large numbers of ethnic Germans, about 3.5 million people, lived along the west and north borders with Germany – these were the Sudetenland Deutsch. The center of this area was the city of Cheb, called Eger in German, and the regional capital of what was known as Egerland – Ditie’s girlfriend is an ethnic German phy. ed. teacher from Cheb. This part of central Europe is mountainous and heavily wooded. The Germans who lived in this area, many of them Hussite refugees who settled in the forests during the Wars of Religion in the 17th century, supported themselves largely by manufacturing glass from the sandy soil in the forests. (Industries making use of silica deposits in the area are still prevalent – when I traveled to Prague about 15 years ago, I recall the huge sand and gravel mines near the border between Germany and Czechoslovakia.) These people were patriotic Germans – Sudeten Deutsch suffered some of the highest casualty rates for any region in World War I, 34 dead for every one-thousand people.



In 1938, after the Anschluss with Austria, Hitler sought to annex Sudetenland to German. Ultimately, Neville Chamberlain and the western powers acquiesced and the provinces of Czechoslovakia bordering Germany became part of that country. This measure, of course, did not avoid war – Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March of 1939. During the war, the Nazis persecuted the Czechs and committed a number of atrocities; the Germans also deported the 300,000 Jews living in the country to death camps, including the notorious Theresianstadt in Bohemia, where the they were murdered. The Sudeten Germans were strongly pro-Nazi – in Germany proper, NSDAP membership never exceeded 7.5% of the population. By contrast, the Nazi party boasted 17.8% membership in the Sudetenland.

The Germans lost the war and, at the 1945 Potsdam conference, it was agreed that all ethnic Germans would be deported from Sudetenland. Deportations began in 1946 and continued for three years. Some of the Germans were simply moved into the Theresianstadt concentration camp where a number of them were murdered. Several massacres occurred and large numbers of Germans were killed by the avenging Czechs – the total number of Germans slaughtered in the exodus is somewhere between 15,000 and 270,000 according to various sources. (The true figure is probably close to 15,000 than the larger estimate.) There are presently about 40,000 Germans remaining in Czech Republic – a tiny proportion of the 3. 5 million Germans who once lived in that country. Reparations for confiscated German property were proposed and some legislation considered on this issue in 2010 – the legislative measure did not pass.

The Communists felt that it would be wise to maintain buffer zones between Czechoslovakia and German. As a result, the areas where the Germans had lived were simply left empty and, in some cases, made into National Parks, for instance NP Sumava. As a result, there are many ghost-towns in Moravia and the former Sudetenland, German villages emptied of their people and allowed to fall into ruin. This is shown in some detail in Jiri Menzel’s film.




Representative Men
The notion of the representative man, at least in its modern understanding, arises from Carlyle. In 1841, Carlyle declared that the "history of the world is the biography of great men" – this doctrine is developed in his lecture series On Heroes and Hero Worship. Emerson subscribed to this view as well and, also, lectured on seven great men said to be representative of various aspects of human endeavor – in Emerson’s lectures, Shakespeare embodied "poetry," Goethe was the representative of "writing," Swedenborg was the "the mystic," Napoleon the "man of the world," and Plato "the philosopher" and so on.

Menzel and Hrabal seem to have something similar in mind. Indeed, I Served the King of England, can be interpreted as demythologizing the notion of the representative man. To Menzel and Hrabel, the idea of the heroic "representative man" is problematic – in the breeding station where nubile German girls are mated with Aryan warriors from the Wehrmacht, the pregnant women contemplate images of great Teutonic heroes; beholding pictures of these men is supposed to make their children strong and heroic as well. The film and novel present a counter-perspective. Ditie is a little man and there is nothing heroic about him – at every point, he is shown to be venal, lustful, selfish, even, cowardly. But, ultimately, Ditie’s cowardice is probably preferable to the courage of the German soldiers – heroics that result in their mutilation as shown in the scenes involving the amputee warriors. Czechoslovakia was a young country. Among nations, Czechoslovakia might be considered a child, that is "ditie." In effect, Ditie is the man who represents the plight and particular characteristics of the Czechs and their nation. The Germans were, once, a great nation as are the French and Russians and Americans today – accordingly, these countries seek to exercise their influence on the world stage. Great nations have big armies and engage in large-scale conflicts. Great nations wish to impose their will on others. Great nations are afflicted with great ideas: democracy, communism, national socialism – they have heroic agendas that end in tears. By contrast, a "little, childish" nation like Czechoslovakia doesn’t have a big army, espouses no great political ideas, and doesn’t wish to force its will on others. Big warrior nations seek victory and wish to export their ideas. Small nations must be content with cultivating pleasure, living well, enjoying wine, women, and song.

When the Germans ceased to be a great nation, they were suddenly happy, a people devoted to managing their pleasures – strolling the streets of Berlin, this is immediately apparent. Anyone who has set foot in Canada will acknowledge feeling a great sense of relief – when an American enters Canada, we are exiting from the world-historical stage and there is a distinct pleasure that arises from that sensation. The burden of the world does not rest on the shoulders of the Canadians, nor does it rest on the shoulders of the Czechs. In this respect, Ditie seems to be a representative man, a figure that typifies the ethos and hedonistic morality of the small nation.

 

 

QUIZ:

1.

"The crows assert that a single crow could destroy the heavens. This is certainly true but it proves nothing against the heavens because heaven means precisely: the impossibility of crows."

The author of this aphorism is a famous writer from Czechoslovakia. In Czech, this writer’s name means crow. Name the writer.

 

2.

This Czech scientist invented frequency hopping and spread spectrum technology instrumental in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and other high-tech communications. She also appeared naked in an early Czech film, Ecstasy, (Gustav Machaty, 1930) and was filmed in close-up having an orgasm.

Name this scientist.

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