Jiri Menzel and Closely Watched Trains
The Czech New Wave was short-lived – it lasted from about 1965 until August 1968. In those days, everyone was young – the Baby Boom generation was just attaining adulthood, the Summer of Love took place in 1967, and a cultural revolution seemed to be sweeping the world. These developments penetrated the Iron Curtain and Stalinist repression in Eastern Europe, dominant since Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, seemed to be thawing. Political criticism thrived in the West. The Vietnam war was under attack in the United States and the capitals of Europe. Revolutionary thought flourished in Europe, America, and Japan. Art and dissent advanced on closely aligned parallel tracks.
In this atmosphere, young directors in Czechoslovakia thrived: Milos Foreman, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec, Jan Kadar, and Vera Chyrtilova made important, and state-subsidized, films. FAMU, the highly influential Czech-government film school at the Prague Academy of Fine Arts was besieged by applicants. Jiri Menzel, a young man from Prague, graduated from that school in 1965. He worked as an assistant on several films directed by Vera Chyritilova. She invited him to direct his own short film as part of an omnibus collection entitled Pearls of the Deep. Menzel’s submission to the project was successful and, on the strength of that contribution, he was able to make 1966's Closely Watched Trains, the jewel in the crown of the Czech new wave.
Menzel, next, directed a bold satire about love among political prisoners, Larks on a String. Just as he was completing this film, Soviet tanks rolled into Wenceslas Square in August 1968, President Alexander Dubcek, a liberalizing reformer was ousted, dissidents like Vaclav Havel were arrested, and the Czech New Wave was over. Larks on a String was shelved – it wasn’t released until 1990 after the entire Eastern European house of cards had collapsed. (The film was awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in that year.)
The Oscar for Best Foreign Picture was awarded to Closely Watched Trains in 1967. Ultimately, this may have hurt Menzel more than it did him any good. He was under house arrest and didn’t make another movie for more than five years. Menzel’s slightly older, and better established, compatriots, Ivan Passer, Jan Nemec and Milos Foreman fled to Hollywood. (Nemec lived in the US for 12 years and, finally, settled in Sweden). Foreman had a successful career in this country; Passer made an idiosyncratic masterpiece, Cutter’s Way and, then, drowned in Hollywood’s sea, dropping out of sight. Menzel has always claimed to be a true Czech – that is, indolent, pleasure-seeking, cowardly, and apolitical (this is his own description as stated to the Manchester Guardian in 2006). Born and bred in Prague, he couldn’t bring himself to leave the country and he resisted Hollywood’s siren song. After a time, Menzel came back into prominence and made a number of well-received films in his homeland, including I served the King of England, a movie known to us, released in the United States around 2007. Menzel made, at least, 24 feature films, many of them with promising descriptions and almost none shown in the United States. He was ubiquitous both as a performer and director of Czech television dramas, staged operas, and produced theater work as well. For many years, he played the Frazier Crane character in a TV sit-com Hospoda (the Pub) – the Wikipedia summary for the program is charming: "Menzel plays a psychiatrist who comes to the pub every day after work. He has a lot of fun with his friends."
W. H. Auden
In his long poem, The Age of Anxiety, Auden depicts a romantic encounter between a woman and a handsome sailor in the United States navy. Auden writes:
"In times of war, even the crudest kind of postive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need."
Closely Watched Trains is highly subversive film about sex in war time. Based on a 1965 novel by Bohumil Hrabel, the film is understated, even quietly comical, but the picture’s indictment of war and its mentality is thoroughgoing and ferocious.
Two Quotes by Bohumil Hrabel
Menzel collaborated with the Czech novelist Bohumil Hrabel on many films. I served the King of England for instance, is based on a Hrabel novel.
Hrabel used (he died at 82 a few years ago) very, very long sentences. Several of his novels consist of only one sentence – his style combining a torrent of words syntactically comprising an immense sentence and magical realism has been immensely influential: the work of the great Hungarian novelist Laszlo Krasznahorkai, possibly the most important writer working today, is unthinkable without the influence of Hrabel.
Hrabel said that the best day in the world would be "whiling away the time placing bets on three-legged horses with beautiful names."
He wrote: "It’s odd that young poets always write about death while old fogies are obsessed with young girls."
Hrabel’s master is Jan Hasek, the author of the Czech national epic: The Good Soldier Svejk. That novel embodies the Czech approach to heroism and warfare – the cowardly pragmatist who lives to fight (and love) another day is infinitely to be preferred to the young warrior who leaves his corpse on the field of battle. It’s important to understand that Closely Watched Trains’ inadvertent hero, Milos Hrma, the young stationmaster’s assistant dies accidentally. The German machine-gunner in the armored ammunition train just happens to see him poised above the tracks and shoots him down as a kind of after-thought.
Toys
The Czechs love small mechanical toys, spinning tops, music boxes, clockwork automatons – the locomotive, although ultimately a symbol of sexual prowess, is also a toy. The train station is full of levers and telegraph transcription devices and, all manner of signals, and lighted displays. In Prague, Milos’ girlfriend helps her uncle, a photographer. The uncle seems to specialize in slightly racy pictures of buxom young women – we see him casually groping one of girl’s breasts while he poses her atop a toy plane. The little plane, used as comic set on which young lovers can perch and cuddle, is shown hovering over Prague with the famous castle prominent on its sky-line. This toy plane, of course, is a miniature of the war plane that hurls bombs down on Prague and destroys the photographer’s little shop.
Even instruments of death are toys. The enigmatic Victoria Freie (a German terrorist whose name means "free") delivers the bomb that triggers the film’s climax wrapped like a gift box of Swiss chocolates. The bomb when opened and inspected turns out to be similarly toy-like – it has a clock and some wires wrapped around sticks of dynamite. It’s a fascinating device and the great Casanova, Stationmaster Hubicka, is intrigued by the weapon and has to be pointedly ordered to keep his hands off the device. Toys want to be handled. The toy-women in the film are sexually available to be played-with and touched. The film’s climax is both sexual (Fraulein Freie has sex with Milos) and violently explosive. The locomotive under it’s mantle of black smoke approaches the station where Milos waits with the bomb. The attack on the armored train is complicated by Councilor Zdenick’s inquiry into the question of Hubicka’s use of the station’s official rubber stamps to imprint German words on the thighs and buttocks of his young girlfriend. While the inquiry is underway, the fatal train is approaching and Milos has to slip out of the station to hide in the signal above the tracks to drop the bomb. This sequence could be played for suspense – indeed, there is a similar sequence that operates on the heroic scale of the same sort in David Lean’s Bridge over the River Kwai. But true to the Czech ethos that despises the pathos of war heroism, Closely watched Trains riffs on the attacks on the train, not only in Bridge over the River Kwai, but also Lawrence of Arabia, by miniaturizing the sequence, rendering it small, comical, and, indeed, toy-like.
Subversion
One of the most radically subversive films ever made was directed and conceived by a Czech, Jan Svankmeyer – I am referring to his film about sexual perversion called Conspirators of Pleasure. Menzel’s work is antecedent and related to Svankmeyer’s alarming film. (Similarly, the intense sex-pol in the films of the Serbo-Croatian director, Dusan Makayayev, for instance, WR Mysteries of the Organism about Wilhelm Reich and Sweet Movie about chocolate, sex and death, seem based in a vision of the world closely aligned to what we shown in Closely Watched Trains. Menzel’s film is fundamentally Reichian (that is based on the psychoanalytic theory of Wilhelm Reich) – politics is sublimated sex, war is sexual energy sublimated into violence, ultimately everything is sexually charged; the repression of sexual instincts transforms inanimate objects into surreal specters signifying sexual passion.
Some examples of Menzel’s surreal sexual imagery include the SM-vision of the Countess riding her stallion, much to the excitement of the men watching her buttocks bounce on the horse’s saddle, the Station is equipped with all sorts phallic levers and rods and the trains are assemblies of throbbing, thrusting pistons and cam-shafts. Hubicek seduces a girl by imprinting her buttocks with administrative rubber stamps. The stationmaster’s wife strokes the erect throat of a goose that she is apparently feeding. A tear in an Austrian sofa much prized by the Stationmaster is filmed in close-ups that have a strangely shocking effect – it’s as if we’re being shown some kind of surrogate for genitalia, a tear or gash surrounded by straw-like upholstery stuffing. The little toy trains blast steam into the air that freezes and descends like a fog of ejaculate. When the hero dies in the climax following his sexual climax, two hats are swept across the station by the force of the blast – hats are Freudian symbols for the female sex.
This kind of hyper-sexualized imagery is closely correlated with disturbing material – sex is inextricably entwined with death in the human imagination. When Milos ejaculates prematurely, he immediately attempts suicide in a gruesome and exceptionally disturbing scene. (The brothel room where slits his wrists is equipped with a nice portrait of sexy-looking female saint.) A woman kills a rabbit that shrieks in a upsetting high whistle – the animal is apparently killed on-camera. Later, we see the fetal-looking rabbit tacked to a wall to be disemboweled. (The dead rabbit will remind viewers of Roman Polanski’s use of a rabbit’s carcass to horrific effect in Repulsion.) A station worker descries the Germans’ cruelty and incompetence in transporting animals by train – the reference is implicitly to the freight cars loaded with Jews being shipped to death camps. A cow is described as having incompletely given birth – the animal has a dead calf hanging out of its vagina and the baby is "already rotting." The Germans put sheep in cars and don’t feed them – the sheep start eating one another’s wool. But the Czech man making these comments isn’t any better – when a bull loaded on a freight car gives him trouble he proudly says that he "gouged out the bull’s eyes" so that he became "as calm as a lamb." Blinding a bull signifies castration. The cow with the dead calf dangling out of her ‘butt’ is an equally disturbing image of death and reproduction. In one scene, we see a group of German nurses engaged in a orgy with German troops.
Whenever Zdenek, the quisling Czech councilor appears, the sound track roars with Liszt’s Les Preludes. The heroic theme from Les Preludes was played by the Germans in propaganda broadcasts celebrating German victories as an embodiment of the indomitable spirit of the Wehrmacht. Les Preludes, therefore, signifies victory. Menzel plays the theme for the last time so establish that Milos is now victorious in love – he has overcome his affliction of ejaculatio praecox. (The kindly doctor Brabec is played by Menzel himself.)
Victory in love is better than victory on the battlefield.
Hyenas
When the armored ammunition train is blown to pieces, Zdenek, the collaborator, says that the "Czech people are nothing more than laughing hyenas.’
These were the words that SS Gruppenfuehrer Reinhard Heydrich used to characterize the Czechs before he was mortally wounded by an explosion in Prague. This attack by the Czech resistence, in turn, led to the infamous Nazi reprisal at Lidice in Czech Bohemia.
For Discussion
Menzel’s film has a documentary aspect, shot in black and white and using natural light and locations. (Although the interiors were shot at Prague’s famous Barradanov Studios.) The Czech film industry was masterful in using its weaknesses (low budgets) to its advantage? How does the documentary style and low budget imagery support Menzel’s ideas and the thesis of his film?
Menzel avoids censorship by ostensibly avoiding political controversy – that is, he chooses "safe" subjects. In post-war Eastern Europe, a movie decrying Nazi brutality is the safest of safe subjects. Similarly, many great East European directors avoided politics by making movies about love or eros. Milos Foreman’s The Loves of a Blonde is an example. But is there something implicitly critical of the Czech Communist regime in this film? Note, for instance, that the focus is not on the Nazi tyrant, but, more disturbingly, on the quisling Councilor Zdenek. How do you respond to Closely Watched Trains if you are a Czech censor and apparatchik?
What do you make of the graphic attempted suicide scene? Isn’t the hero’s attempted suicide wildly out of proportion to its ostensible cause? What is Menzel telling us about his hero (and by extension about Czech men since Milos Hrma is posited as a Czech "everyman")?
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