Crude, sometimes clunky, always amateurishly acted, Karel Steklý’s Siréna, from Marie Majerovà’s novel, is also gripping and powerful. A corrective to much that goes haywire in one of John Ford’s lamest films, How Green Was My Valley (1941), Siréna won the top prize at Venice and remains the only Czech film to have done so—though the outcome would likely be different today. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), from Denmark, also competed that year.
Steklý’s film refers to an actual event: in 1889, in Kladno, a suburb of Prague, the strike by grossly underpaid workers in a metallurgical factory. The film focuses on a single family, although one other family in particular weaves in and out of it. The contrast between the industrialist’s digs and the working-class lodgings seems crudely imagined, and the power structure that found the military police bending instantly to the industrialist’s desire for the indiscriminate slaughter of his employees needs much more detailed contextualization. On the other hand, after one of their children is ruthlessly gunned down, the people’s mob-rage against the industrialist’s mansion—the trashing of musical instruments, other furniture, artwork, etc.—is enormously convincing.
Two more things help make the film great. One is its raw urgency, as though the filmmakers felt that the immediacy of the moral issues involved had to take precedence over period detail and evocation; the other is the dark, grimy visual poetry that Steklý conjures somewhere betwixt phantasmagoria and hard reality. Outstanding in this regard is the factory at night, a complicated complex of tall, looming structures heaving illuminated blasts of smoke.
The strike itself was crushed. Thus the film looks ahead to Communist Czechoslovakia, with indigestible utterances marking the way. But the real aim might lie even farther ahead: social justice.
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THE STRIKE (Karel Steklý, 1947)
Crude, sometimes clunky, always amateurishly acted, Karel Steklý’s Siréna, from Marie Majerovà’s novel, is also gripping and powerful. A corrective to much that goes haywire in one of John Ford’s lamest films, How Green Was My Valley (1941), Siréna won the top prize at Venice and remains the only Czech film to have done so—though the outcome would likely be different today. Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Day of Wrath (1943), from Denmark, also competed that year.
Steklý’s film refers to an actual event: in 1889, in Kladno, a suburb of Prague, the strike by grossly underpaid workers in a metallurgical factory. The film focuses on a single family, although one other family in particular weaves in and out of it. The contrast between the industrialist’s digs and the working-class lodgings seems crudely imagined, and the power structure that found the military police bending instantly to the industrialist’s desire for the indiscriminate slaughter of his employees needs much more detailed contextualization. On the other hand, after one of their children is ruthlessly gunned down, the people’s mob-rage against the industrialist’s mansion—the trashing of musical instruments, other furniture, artwork, etc.—is enormously convincing.
Two more things help make the film great. One is its raw urgency, as though the filmmakers felt that the immediacy of the moral issues involved had to take precedence over period detail and evocation; the other is the dark, grimy visual poetry that Steklý conjures somewhere betwixt phantasmagoria and hard reality. Outstanding in this regard is the factory at night, a complicated complex of tall, looming structures heaving illuminated blasts of smoke.
The strike itself was crushed. Thus the film looks ahead to Communist Czechoslovakia, with indigestible utterances marking the way. But the real aim might lie even farther ahead: social justice.
Tags: east european cinema
This entry was posted on December 8, 2007 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Formal Capsule Film Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.