Inverness Film Fans’ Chairman Tony Janssens introduces a new InFifa season of classic central European arthouse cinema, which begins this Tue 22 Mar with Milos Forman’s A BLONDE IN LOVE.
In the sixties and seventies a very high number of superbly original films were made in those countries that genuinely form the heart of Europe. Despite strict political pressures, originating in Moscow, individual talents emerged who would achieve worldwide acclaim and prominence, not all of them by escaping to the west, but by imaginatively rejecting the doctrines of socialist realism imposed on them.
InFiFa will screen four stylistically varied films from four richly cultured countries that are not only close neighbours to the Ukraine, but have at some stage during the last 8 decades been "colonised" by the powers that rule present day Russia, yet are now full members of the European Union.
- A BLONDE IN LOVE Czechoslovakia (Tue 22 Mar)
- THE SHOP ON THE HIGH STREET Slovak Repbulic (Tue 5 Apr)
- MOTHER JOAN OF THE ANGELS Poland (Tue 19 Apr)
- ELECTRA, MY LOVE Hungary (Tue 3 May)
Our first film is an early gem directed by Czech-born Milos Forman, a name known to cinema audiences at large, mainly because of the films he made in Hollywood.
A Blonde in Love (US title Loves of a Blonde) is one of those truly fresh films, characterized by a style that incorporates semi-improvised dialogue, a sensitive handling of inexperienced, often even non-professional actors and a superb ear for all nuances of music and natural sounds.
A young, female shoe factory worker in a town depleted of unattached men, falls in love with a pianist, and for her it is an intense emotional experience whilst for the young man it's nothing more than a delightful one-night-stand. When she pursues him to his home town she embarrasses him and is made to feel unwelcome by his parents.
Forman shows great tenderness for the girl while mocking the conservativism and hypocrisy of the older generation. The ironic eye cast on human behaviour and contemporary society, and not just Czech, is as witty and vivid today as it was then. Forman's camera captures in such a subtle way those almost imperceptible signs of innermost thoughts and feelings, mixed with a gentle, spontaneous sense of observational humour, it represented a new kind of cinema. Unconventional too, in the way it depicts ordinary people, and the banalities of life, containing so much more real drama than the carefully scripted and elaborate plots of the American pictures. Only 82 minutes long, its influence on present day cinema remains immense.
Shortly after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 Forman's films were banned and the director, together with his co-writer Ivan Passer and cameraman Miroslav Ondricek, were doing research for a film set in the US. They remained there to make several successful films, none more so than One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus. But they never really regained the same kind of freshness and spirit of innovation so rapturously evident in his early features.
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