FILM JOURNAL

Elmar Klos and Jan Kadar, The Shop on Main Street (Czechoslovakia, 1966)

 Tony the main character seems to have all of these internal issues.  On one hand he has his wife Rosie, breathing down his neck about all the things he can't do right and on the other he seems like a good person who is just confused about so many different things such as his stand as far as what is going on around him politically and the current issue of the Holocost.  A lot of Tony's ideas, motives, and feelings are conveyed as a voice over of thoughts in his his head.

During a drunken celebration between Tony, his wife, his brother-in-law Mark, and Mark's wife who is Rosie's sister, Tony goes off on Mark about cheating him and Mark throws over a document stating that as an Aryan his is intitled to a shop owned by Ms. Luetzman, a Jew.  The next morning he is dressed and ready for work bright and early.  He gets to the shop and meets the owner who happens to be a sweet old Jewish lady, and he just can't get himself to tell the owner that he is in fact the new owner of the shop.  Throughout the film he tries to take over the shop from under the Jewish lady but in doing so, they establish some kind of friendship and it makes it impossible to do so. 

The film directors make it so hard to hate Tony because of the compassion he shows to the older woman.  He could have literally thrown her out  because of the current political situation but he doesn't.  He instead lies to his wife and leads her to believe he has it all under control and she in turn gets off his back.  You can feel how he is being pulled in two directions. 

When the alarms start sounding and the army has come to take all of the Jewish people in the town to what will presumably be Concentration Camps, Tony scrambles to hide Ms. Luetzman without scaring her.  He goes back and forth between his conscience and the actual situation at hand.  Tony gets drunker and drunker and for a second the it seems the old woman might have an actual clue as to what's going on but it could just be she is in denial.  She starts to panic and this makes Tony even more irrational.  He grabs her to hide her in the closet and as she is fighting him, he pushes her inside the closet and she trips over a box.  Tony does not realize what he has done until it's too late.  By the time he returns to closet to tell her it's safe to come out he finds her lying there lifeless.  He can't believe what he has done and because of this he finds a rope and hangs himself. 

The doors open and light pores in like a picture and it flashes to a dream sequence of Tony and Ms. Luetzman dressed up and walking arm in arm with a band playing the song she would play on her radio.

 The film itself seemed to focus on Tony and his issues and how he responds to them, rather than the Holocost or anything else that goes on around him.

The Joke Jarmil Jires (Czechoslovakia, 1969)

The ending shot of the story where he is beating up the younger kid he tells him "You're not the person I wanted to beat up," and then the movie is over.  It's like he had so many demons and so much frustration inside him that he took it out on the boy and he knew it was wrong yet he still did it.

Loves of a Blonde, Foreman (Czechoslovakia 1966)

 The film starts out with a girl singing a rock song and then pans in to a very close shot of two friends laying next to each other talking about a ring Andula the main character was given by her boyfriend.  It almost seemed like Andula was the older more experienced one and she was sharing those experiences with the other girl. Then the next scene opens with Andula and her two friends heading to some kind of mixer and as they arrive they notice that all the men are old, and not what they expected.  As they head inside the three girls sit down and are immediately spotted by three older men who are contemplating whether or not they should approach Andula and her friends.  The three girls try desperately to avoid their stares but to no avail.  The men send a bottle of wine to them but the waiter mistakenly gives it to the three ghastly women next to them.  It was interesting to me that the waiter did that, as if he even knew the three men were in over their heads.  The mix up is eventually cleared up and the bottle returned to its intended recipients and that is when the three older men make their move.  They sit all night and even after everyone has left chit chatting with the ladies and all the while are trying to get them to leave to go to the "after party."  And as three ladies go to the bathroom to discuss what they want to do Andula meets "Milda" the pianist at the party with which she had been making eye contact all night.  He manipulates her into going back with him to his room and he is so good at it too.  They ultimately end up having sex and afterward you get the sense that they are now a couple...and that they have known each other for so long.  It's not awkward at all as a matter of fact. They part ways and after breaking up with her other boyfriend in a very mean way she heads to Prague to find Milda.  She ends up at his apartment that he lives in with his parents.  Suitcase in hand, she knocks on their door and is greeted by Milda's father who informs her that Milda is not home and doesn't know where he is.  The situation becomes more awkward when Milda's mother invites her in and she ends up having to stay the night and she hears all the family arguing about why she is there.  The embarrassment is all written all over her face and it makes you feel for her. 

Closely Watched Trains (Chechoslovakia, 1966) Jiri Menzel

This film was by far my favorite. It had a more relaxed and comedic approach to it. It contained many serious moments that were in way made light of.

Milos Foreman has only a few goals in life: the first being to work as his at the train station doing nothing just as his father, grandfather, and great grandfather did. His second goal is to have sex, pure and simple. The entire movie is based right out of that train station and a few back roads, yet there is so much going on there, you don't need much more. Each employee of the train station has so many interesting quirks about them that any one of them could have been the protagonist. He gets the job, working at the train station and everyone wants to teach him something, Hubicka one of the dispatchers at the train station is the one who gets the ladies, and he is the one who ultimately helps Milo become a man. He sets up this encounter with an older women (the same woman with whom he conspires with to deliver the explosives to blow up the train) for Milo and they have sex in the train station. Milo becomes more like Hubicka, exactly what their boss did not want to happen.

This film was more sexually explicit than any previous film and contained many serious matters masked with comedy. For example, Milo attempts suicide by slicing his wrists, and other than the point where he is found in the tub naked and bleeding to death, no one expresses how serious it is. They focus more on his problem with premature ejaculation rather than the fact that his tried to kill himself.

The ending of the film depicts Milo as the hero, the one who mistakenly dies after throwing the bomb on the train and getting shot by the guard on the train. He falls on the train and the train blows up. He became everything he didn't want or care to be. He wanted to grow up to be like his father and father's father, he never dreamed in a million years or even longed to be a hero. All Milo wanted was to sleep with his girl-friend.

Knife In The Water (Poland 1962) Roman Polanski

In this film, although there wasn't intense dialogue, there was still so much said between the three characters by body language and eye contact. This film is strictly based on the interaction of these three characters.

The film opens with a close up shot of Christina driving and Andrzej sitting in the passenger seat. It's such a personal and up close shot, they are literally sitting side by side, speaking to each other but there isn't any sound. They were arguing about something, but one could infer that it was the way she was driving, Andrzej seemed uncomfortable with it made her pull of the side of the road so they could switch.

As soon as Andrzej starts driving a man appears from out of no where in the middle of the road trying to hitch a ride. They have to swerve to avoid hitting him and the moment they stop Andrzej gets out of the car and starts yelling at this young looking man. Christina and the young man lock eyes and you can almost feel the attraction between them. They end of giving him a ride and from that point on in the film the two men are competing against each other for Christina’s attention.

The entire film is very isolate, they are on the dock, alone. They are on the boat in the lake, alone. There isn’t anyone else around, no other form of life except them. The camera shots are close up, it almost felt like I was there on the boat. It was that intimate of a setting. Everywhere on the boat is a tight space and they are locking heads in almost every scene. The younger character is usually outsmarted by Andrzej and it’s interesting to watch the two men compete.

The ending of the movie in which Christina confesses in a nonchalant manner that she cheated on him with the younger man and the fact that he doesn’t believe it, basically telling her yeah right, leaves them at a cross roads literally. He can either confess to killing the younger man which he really didn’t but Christina doesn’t do a very good job at convincing him otherwise. So he’s torn, between confessing to this murder he doesn’t commit or turning the opposite way and going home. And that’s just the way the movie ends, leaving you wondering what he decided to do.

What I liked most about this film was the way the director shot it so tightly. If it had been done any other way, I don’t believe it would have had the same effect.

Ashes and Diamonds (Poland 1957) Andrzej Wajda

This film provided many visuals outside of the actual story line that one could say interprets the views of the writer with regard to the relationship of religion and the resistance as well as the films aim to be moderate with it’s message. Every scene to me, had somewhat been a consequence of an action that took place earlier in the film.

Consequence and conscience were two very important factors that plagued the main character Maciek. For example, after a botched assassination attempt on the life of the Party Secretary Szcezeika where two innocent men were mistook for him and shot to death by Maciek the protagonist in the movie, the dead men haunt him throughout the film in various ways. The directors deliberate pan on the crosses leads me to interpret it as a fallen state and a disagreement between church and State.

Maciek begins to have second thoughts about carrying out the second attempt to assassinate the Party Secretary when he meets a girl working at the bar and overnight begins to develop feelings for her. All of a sudden, Maciek sees life, his life, in a different perspective. He tries to talk Andrezk who is Maciek’s superior, out of the whole assassination by telling him the way he feels about life now. Before it didn’t matter to him whether he killed or was killed, now he just wanted to live and love. [She] gave him a reason to live now. Andrezk reminds him that he was the one who offered to take the job, he wasn’t forced and the only way he will go with Andrezk is to carry out the plan. At this point, there really wasn’t a choice for Maciek, he had to keep his word.

Maciek carries out the mission, but as he fires the fatal shots, fireworks explode and the town celebrates an unrelated event, the Szcezeika falls to his death into the arms of his killer, which could be reference to his estranged son who was captured earlier that day. As he is walking away the train behind him blows it’s whistle, signifying that he decided not to go along with Andrezk, and although he just committed murder, he walks contently toward his new future. That is until he is spotted by the Mayors former assistant who Maciek watches take a beating from the Mayor because of the spectacle he made during a dinner for Poland. Maciek begins to run from him after unsuccessfully avoiding to be seen by him.

The last few scenes in the movie leave a lot to be interpreted. As he is running, he draws the attention of the soldiers who order him to stop, when he doesn’t they start shooting at him. He is wounded and flees into a field of hanging white sheets where he hides in one of them, blood seeps through the sheet in a very eerie way. He then manages to drag himself to a landfill where he curls up in the fetal position like a little boy and dies.

The message of this film is strong. The way the director uses visuals and lets his audience find the message he is trying to get across without being blatant was very appealing to me. I liked the fact that I had to think throughout the whole film about what it was he was actually saying with each scene.