The story goes that Czech film maker, Milos Forman, left Prague to finish a movie script with which he was having difficulty. Forman holed-up in a small village in the country to work in solitude on the script. One night, he attended a lottery and charity ball fundraiser for the local volunteer fire department. The affair was so bizarre and corrupt that Forman could think of nothing else. He abandoned his previous project and with Ivan Passer sketched a scenario for a satiric comedy based on the experience. The resulting film, The Firemen's Ball was premiered in 1967. Predictably, Czechoslovakian fire fighters protested the movie and called for it's boycott. Nonetheless, the short film -- it's only 74 minutes long -- was a big hit in Czechoslovakia, sold 750,000 tickets and, then, was re-broadcast to much acclaim on Czech State TV in 1969. Critics are accustomed to consider the film an allegory about the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia, but Forman denied that intention and, indeed, the movie was never censored or suppressed by the Czech government, notwithstanding the violent Soviet-backed crack-down in 1968, Forman wasn't being disingenuous. The film's satire is general, corrosive, and applicable to pretty much any human polity.
The Firemen's Ball begins with the camera following a small ceremonial fire-axe that is passed from hand-to-hand. A committee of about ten older men, most of them fat and homely (one has a Hitler moustache) are planning a charity ball and intend to bestow the ornate little axe on their former chairman, a handsome and dignified older fellow (he's 86) who is dying of cancer. The action takes place in Socialist Palace of Culture in a small town. A man perched on a tall ladder is foxing the edges of a big ornate banner showing firefighters heroically engaged in putting out a savage-looking house fire -- the home has big red flames surging out of its windows and the firefighters are clambering all over the structure in their rooster-comb hats carrying hatchets and hoses. The man foxing the edges of the huge banner is using a torch for some reason and, of course, he lights the decorative scroll on fire. It burns as he dangles in the air. The firefighters try to put out the blaze but their extinguisher doesn't work and the thing burns to ashes. (The fate of the firefighter dangling twenty feet in the air is left to our imagination.)
The ball ensues and takes up the majority of the film. The Committee have gathered various items as prizes for a lottery. Apparently, the people attending the Ball, which is packed to overflowing,, have purchased lottery tickets with the proceeds to benefit the local fire department. The Committee also plans a beauty pageant with the notion that the winner will bestow the ceremonial axe on the old man as the guest of honor. Everything goes wrong. First, the Committee can't find any girls willing to participate in the humiliating beauty pageant. Second, everyone gets drunk and people (including the firefighters) start stealing the lottery prizes, a motley assortment of objects such as toys, china figurines, and comestibles in the form of plum brandy, head cheese and a ham. The beauty pageant is a calamity: the girls, most of them definitely not conventional beauty queen candidates, refuse to go on-stage. When the processional march is played for the beauty pageant, the old man who is very deaf thinks it's for him and he prematurely strides up to the stage to accept his honor. Meanwhile, the homely girls have fled to the women's toilet and won't come out. The Committee members, then, drag a half-dozen young women at random up on stage -- the girls are like the Sabine women: they have to be hauled kicking and screaming over the shoulders of the firefighters who drop them on the stage. Before the beauty queen can be selected, a fire breaks out at a farmhouse near the ballroom. The firefighters fail to put out the blaze. All the guests at the Ball use the opportunity to evade paying their drink tabs. (The bartenders from the Palace of Culture try to recoup their losses by selling wine and beer from a folding table next to the huge, blazing fire.) The old man who lives in the house is saved as are a few chickens and goat. Later, the Committee gives the victim of the fire all of the lottery tickets as a donation, But this also turns out to be futile. When the crowd returns to the ball room, most of the lottery prizes have gone missing. This is an outrage and so the Committee shuts off all the lights and asks people to show some decency and put back on the table the prizes that they have stolen. When the lights are turned-on, only one person is trying to put his ill-gotten goods on the table -- this happens to be one of the Committee members who has stolen the head-cheese. All of the remaining prizes have now gone vanished -- so the unfortunate farmer just gets a couple of baskets of ticket -- "these are just worthless craps of paper," he exclaims. In an attempt to salvage the evening, the old man is invited to the dais to receive the ceremonial axe. The old man delivers an eloquent and dignified speech thanking the committee for the honor. But, when he opens the wooden casket, the ceremonial axe is missing. The film ends with an overhead shot of the burned-out house. The old farmer's bed is sitting outside in the snow. One of the Committee members, who seems to be senile, crawls into bed with the farmer as it begins to snow.
The film is grotesque and very funny. The filmmaking is very fluent and self-assured -- almost all of the participants are non-professionals, just town folk in the village where the movie was shot. Although the film has an allegorical aspect, it's not exactly clear what Forman is referencing other than human cupidity and folly in general. Accordingly, the picture stands as a convincing symbol for corruption of any kind you want to imagine -- open-ended enough that the film will mean different things to different people. (If you want to see the movie as an allegory for the corruption of Trump's regime, for instance, the film can certainly be interpreted according to that rubric.) The notion that the firefighters are vigorously stealing from one another at a Ball meant for their fiscal benefit and that their depredations occur at the same time a very real building is burning down has a nightmarish quality. Kafka, it must be remembered, was Czech himself and there are certainly aspects of the story consistent with his mordant vision of human life.
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