Word: cinema
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...look of a winner as he held court with his wife Anne. Despite his swimming schedule, the actor met with Directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Constantin Costa-Gavras and Francois Truffaut. "It's been nice not just shaking hands with them but getting together around a table and talking cinema," he said later. Hoffman, however, declined to reveal any plans to work with one of the three directors. When a reporter asked what he expected to be doing in ten years, Dustin quipped, "The way things are going in medicine and technology, I might well be having a baby...
Antonin J. Liehm's Closely Watched Films is to my knowledge the most up to date comprehensive study of Czech cinema available in English. Avoiding the technical, pseudo -professional jargon usually associated with film criticism, he presents an illuminating analysis of the origins of Czech film's new wave of the 60's. With regard to the difficulties of filmmaking in the 1950s, Liehm says that "with the consolidation of a dictatorship that proved to be military-bureaucratic rather than revolutionary, it became increasingly clear that the liberation of the film from the dictates of the market meant its subjugation...
...future of Czech film directors in America is a different story from the future of Czech cinema. Some of the best have left the country (the last to leave was Jan Nemec who arrived in Paris last summer, after six years of not being allowed to shoot). Those who stayed are on the blacklist, and to be blacklisted in Prague--as well as in Hollywood in the fifties--means to lose the possibility to do creative work for many years. Ivan Passer once related how eager he was to start shooting his first American movie, Born...
Maybe 1968 signaled the end of the "new wave." However, a dozen directors of international standing were already turning to something different, finding new ways of expressing their talent. The Russian invasion not only put an end to the "new wave" but, for the time being anyway, to Czech cinema as such...
...that the West is becoming acquainted with the extraordinary revival of Czech literature that took place during the 1960s as these remarkable works keep coming from Western publishers, along with books, written after the Russian invasion, that are banned from publication in Czechoslovakia. Contrary to the situation in cinema, we have here much more of a sense of the continuity of this literary trend. Movie production is a "public activity" which requires substantial material means; once the political conditions had changed, the production of "undesirable" directors was stopped. Writers are much more difficult to silence. They may not be published...