The American Cinenatheque is currently running their annual fantasy and science fiction festival right now, but I hadn’t really bothered to pay attention to it because the lead highlights were a run of Caroline Munro movies, a dubious new Tobe Hooper movie, and some current stuff that didn’t really stand out.
Buried in the schedule’s fine print though was this:
End Of August At The Hotel Ozone (Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon) 1966, 80 min. Dir. Jan Schmidt. Scr. By Pavel Jurácek. Decades after a nuclear holocaust and the world is devoid of men, leaving only an isolated band of feral young women on horseback roaming the forests of Europe – until they reach the last vestige of civilization, the Hotel Ozone. Superb, thought-provoking sci-fi, something like Andrei Tarkovsky directing Mad Max with an all-female cast, with memorable b&w cinematography by Jiri Macak.
Voyage To The End Of The Universe (Ikarie XB-1) 1963, 84 min. Dir. Jindrich Polak. Scr. By Pavel Jurácek and Jindrich Polak. Another Czech sci-fi rarity, this was briefly released in the U.S. in the early ‘60s by AIP and then promptly disappeared – until now. A crew of astronauts encounter a deadly plague during a cross-galaxy voyage, in this excellent precursor to both Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another beautiful b&w film, with eye-popping ‘60s Euro pop-art design. Prints courtesy the Narodni Film Archive in Prague. [Both films in Czech with English subtitles.]
Pop-art Eastern European apocalypse movies are like my narrowcast target demographic so I have no idea how I’ve missed both of these until now, but both are must-sees when they hit your local film geek pusher. End Of August… plays out almost like a documentary – not much dialog and what there is of the plot is the typical struggle of civilization versus barbarism versus the disconnect people have because of that. Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is a later reference point. Perhaps even a gender-reversed Le Dernier Combat. Even more remarkable than the cast of unknowns is the dead village use to film in. It’s not a set, it’s an actual abandoned town that just barely held together by the overgrowth of vines holding the buildings up.
Voyage To The End Of The Universe is the absurdist 2001. A future communist utopia sends it’s first interstellar spacecraft (the Ikaria) to Alpha Centauri and along the way encounters a derelict spaceship of decadent capitalists (hilariously shown as an outer space gambling casino with roulette wheels and card tables and a swankily dressed crew), deals with crew ennui (apparently by elaborate dance routines), and pesky space radiation which may or may not be beneficial. Faster than you can say “1845 Franklin Expedition“, members of the crew pass out and/or go insane and the fun begins. So the script is kinda dippy, but the Panton-esque sets and the mostly electronic (slack-key guitar grafted onto the Forbidden Planet bleeps and bloops) soundtrack is just flat out amazing.
So who’s this guy Pavel Jurácek? Based on the two movies I’ve seen so far, he’s the Czech Rod Serling. Their favorite themes are similar – societal tedium and the breakdown of systems and people. Idealization of a home that’s unreachable (or may not even exist). Not much more about him on the web except that he unsurprising fled Czechoslovakia in 1967 when the Soviet Union invaded and only managed to make one more movie in 1970.
There’s another night of his movies at the Cinematheque, and I’m not missing it for anything. From the description of one:
Joseph Kilian (Postava K Podpirani), 1963, 38 min. Dirs. Jan Schmidt and Jurácek. This stunning, Kafka-esque short follows a man who sees a shop marked “Cat Rentals,” and rents a kitty for the day. But when he tries to return the animal, the shop has vanished. Terrified by the late fees he’ll incur, he searches desperately for the one official who can help him: Joseph Killian.
