Inspired by Franz Kafka’s Letter to My Father, Czech writer-director and musician Jan Němec’s Nocní hovory s matkou is an elaborate, not quite convincing attempt to relate personal circumstances to the tumultuous political history in which they occurred. During Němec’s lifetime, a main street in Prague successively bore five different names, each reflective of a […]
Tag Archives: Jan Němec
Three escaped Czech prisoners, starving, draw match sticks to determine who will risk his life fetching food for himself and the two others from a parked train that the SS guards. We see one man draw a long stick, another man about to make his pick, and then suddenly there it is: the short match […]
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Written by himself and then-wife Ester Krumbachová, the latter of whom originated the story idea, Jan […]
In 1968 Alexander Dubček, its new leader, instituted a series of reforms that transformed Czechoslovakia’s tenor and political landscape, including freedom of assembly, speech and worship, and the release of all political prisoners. As Mikhail Gorbachev would discover twenty years hence, such a process creates its own dynamic, one that Dubček, likewise remaining a committed […]
Jméno kódu Rubín has nothing in common with realism; it is a thing of fantasy; spiritual, artificially created reality. All my life I have felt that film is much closer to music than to anything else. It means that I work with fantasy, imagination, tones, rhythm, harmony and feelings. Film influences the non-rational spheres of […]
Dennis Grunes 