The Junk Shop was made by Herz on commission -- the film was to be part of a omnibus picture called Pearls of the Deep, featuring the work of several Czech directors associated with the "new wave" movement in that country. Herz' film was too long and, therefore, wasn't released with the other five short pictures comprising Pearls of the Deep. Herz, a part German Slovakian, perhaps, was the odd man out in the anthology -- the other directors were alumni of the estimable Czech film school; Herz, a Jewish survivor of Ravensbruck hadn't been admitted to that school and had found his way to film making through an apprenticeship in Prague's idiosyncratic, if influential, puppet theater. The Junk Shop chronicles one day in the business of an enterprise that accepts all forms of junk, weighs it on a scale, and pays for this detritus by the kilo. The film is very characteristically Czech -- an eccentric, lecherous group of middle-aged men surrounded on all sides by picturesque chaos. Prague is imagined to be a sort of funnel to which the entire world contributes its cast-off debris, all of this stuff ending up in the junk shop. This place looks like a garage with its walls papered with posters and photographs plucked from the garbage. Half of the room is occupied by "seven metric tons" of paper in a huge pile that is heaped against a wall. The other half of the room is filled with curiosities retrieved from the waste -- there are musical tableaux that apparently operate by gear and spring mechanisms, fragments of religious sculptures, and all sorts of kitsch in a state of partial decomposition. The place has a chutes-and-ladders aspect -- people can climb up on the 7 tons of paper to survey their surroundings or, if unwary, fall into the basement below the garage through an open shaft. The basement is decorated with pornographic pictures pulled out of the trash and more religious icons, heaps of old books, and all sorts of other curiosities. The plot is minimal -- an attractive middle-aged woman displays her bosom from a balcony above to the delight of the junkmen, another attractive girl gets weighed on the scale (perhaps, we are all just trash waiting to be carted away), one of the workers goes to lunch and, earns his meal, by telling a racy story that he has read in a thrown-away romance novel, a woman depositing a load of papers in the place loses a spread-sheet over which she has been laboring; when she comes back to search for the paper in the mountain of debris, she, then, loses her son -- he is surely one of the most hideous kids ever featured in a movie. In the afternoon, the workers use a saw to cut up figures of saints carved from linden wood; the little boy is crushed into a cube of paper, but rescued and the boss reassembles the decapitated and dismembered wooden saints to make strange chimeras (he does this mentally, in his imagination). No one works very hard. The customers are paid in either pennies or lottery tickets. A large goose serenely surveys the chaos. The film is based on a sketch by Bohumil Hrabel, the presiding literary genius of the Czech New Wave, and the movie is striking, bizarre, and memorable. It was Herz's first film and bears the stamp of his impressively imaginative approach to film making. The intriguing score is by Zdenek Liska.
Liska's music is the subject of another documentary on The Cremator disk, Hupda Zdenek Liska (The Music of Zdenek Liska). Liska was an early proponent of electronic music, scoring a number of Czech science fiction films with pops and whines and hiss with oscillating tones -- this music sounds like the score to The Forbidden Planet, the American film made in the mid-fifties. The Czech Sci-Fi movies seem to be amazingly terrible. Thereafter, Liska worked scoring the pictures of the New Wave, including the Tarkovsky-influenced epics of Frantisek Vlacil . He provided music for about 11 of Jan Svankmayer's surreal short animated pictures and ended up writing film music for the Quay Brothers in London. Liska could write in any medium. Some of his scores sound like progressive Jazz or, even, Bebop. The score for The Cremator and some of the period pictures produced in Czechoslovakia feature choirs of soprano voices and ethereal instrumentals that have a vaguely New Age sound. Later in his career, he scored Czech TV shows, including the notorious Thirty cases of Inspector Zeman,, a much-derided Socialist crime and mystery show -- apparently, the series Communist propaganda component was so emphatic that the show, which was nevertheless widely popular, was regarded as risible; Zeman's cases were based on actual political crimes against the regime and the show is probably the only TV program in history to feature as its hero a member of the secret police. (In a case of bizarre nostalgie de la boue, Czech punk bands often cover the perky melody that Lisek contrived as the show's theme music.) The documentary is an interesting and painless tour of Czech cinema between the late 50's into the last decade of the 20th century and provide a good introduction to the New Wave films in that country. There are short but fascinating interviews with Herz, Svankmeyer, and the Quay brothers who are shot in their studio qua apartment in London, a murky cabinet of macabre curiosities if there ever was one. A cutting-edge record store in London is, apparently, planning a ten disc re-issue of Liska's music -- that will be a "hard sell" in my view.
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