a place to talk about movies and whatnot
http://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/
that contain pages full of scribbles by She-Dr.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmitry_Merezhkovsky
Resurrection of Gods. Leonardo da Vinci (book 2 of the Christ and Antichrist trilogy, 1900). ISBN 4-87187-839-2
thus in 2014 the issue of "Volhynian Czechs coming home" was one of the highlights of local news.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechs_in_Ukraine
Czechs in Ukraine, often known as Volhynian Czechs (Czech: Volyňští Češi), are ethnic Czechs or their descendants settled mostly in the Volhynia region of Ukraine, in the second half of the 19th century.
...
In 2014, after the revolution in Ukraine and the occupation of Crimea by Russia, some of the Volhynian Czechs from the Zhytomyr region expressed their interest in returning to their native homeland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czechs_in_Ukraine
Between 1868 and 1880, almost 16,000 Czechs left Austria-Hungary for the Russian Empire. The reasons for their departure were the difficult living conditions in the Czech lands.
...
The bulk of the Czechs settled in the region of Volhynia. Some villages were set up in flat meadows, while others were located near existing Ukrainian villages. Local Czech names for the villages they lived in were formed from the original name of the village, which was supplemented with the word "Czech"
mass killings of an estimated 14 million noncombatants between 1933 and 1945, the majority outside the death camps of the Holocaust
this is so amazingickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Tue Apr 06, 2021 10:28 pm believe it or not, when i opened those two volumes (borrowed from the public library in my hometown) they were full of her handwriting.
https://youtu.be/oXugOXkfI0UAn old Czechoslovakian documentary (with English subtitles) about the artwork created by the mentally ill.
twodeadmagpies wrote: ↑Thu Apr 01, 2021 11:04 pm yes yes yes
https://twitter.com/acefilmeu/status/13 ... 4117855233
Amos Vogel: Film as a Subversive Art
BE SURE TO BEHAVE
(A SEKAT DOBROTU)
(Peter Solan, Czechoslavakia, 1968)
It is one thing to make a fictional film in the West about unjust imprisonment in one of Stalin's jails; it was another matter to do so in Czechoslavakia, even under Dubcek, for who knew whether he would last. In this film a woman prisoner, harshly incarcerated, is suddenly released as unpredictably as she had been imprisoned; "Stalin is dead," she is told, and then, significantly, "Be sure to behave."
Without question, the best possible time and the last chance to really faithfully capture, in this case, the purely psychological nature of political imprisonment, which is part of our history, indeed any imprisonment of an innocent person who eventually begins (is forced) to question their innocence.
Excellent filmmaking from people who may have struggled with the idea of whether anyone would ever see the film, yet gave it their all. Solan as always has heart, Lenka Reinerova undoubtedly still has vivid memories and Milenka Dvorska her natural beauty. All of which is reflected in the precision and timelessness of this short, whose atmosphere cannot be approached today, perhaps only glimpsed from afar, there are only a few films that come close, but to show the thought processes of the incarcerated, which are divided into before and after... the consequences of sudden imprisonment, the limitations of space, activities and thought, or even the cynically routine attitude of the prisoners ("Before, there was a trial with the Slansky gang, all hanged."), in twenty-two minutes, is the kind of art you have to make as a protest with limited possibilities to make it this good and impressive.
Five hundred and twelve days later, she hears the child's laughter again...she smiles beautifully at him...the birds singing and indulges in her freedom, she can take as many steps as she wants, but she must not forget... behave, comrade.
The related text (upon which the film is based) by Lenka Reinerová was published under the title "Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nacht" or "All Colors of the Sun and the Night" or "Todos los colores del sol y de la noche". Written in 1956-57, first issued in 1969 (immediately all the copies destroyed), in 2001 reworked and reissued.
In her book, All the Colors of the Sun and the Night, the writer Lenka Reinerová describes her fifteen-month incarceration, most of it in solitary confinement, in Prague’s infamous Ruzyně prison, from where she was released without any further explanation when Stalin died in 1953. To keep herself occupied, she would pull out single strands of her hair and knot them into delicate chains. The guard, watching her from outside through the peephole in the door, would only discern the movement of her hands. Whenever he entered to find out what she had been doing, she would drop her miniature chains to the floor and her frustrated observer would storm out as dumbfounded as before. Similarly, her stories seem to be knotted from fine, elusive threads of memories, pulled from her head and quickly rendered invisible to the reader who wants to probe deeper, beyond the threshold of uncharted pain.
Lenka Reinerová (1916-2008)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenka_Reinerov%C3%A1
Reinerová, the oldest living German-language writer in Prague
Prague writer Lenka Reinerova: Kafka's Last Living Heir
She was a German-Czech-Jewish author who wrote in German. Treasured today as the last Czech German-language writer, she concludes the legacy of Prague's distinguished German-language writers including Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Franz Carl Weiskopf, Egon Erwin Kisch (the "raging reporter"), and, most prominently, Franz Kafka. Most of them were Jewish; quite a few were communists; many were murdered and forgotten, among them her mentors, colleagues and lifelong friends.
last few years i was regularly commuting to work passing next to this house (Plzeňská Street 949, Prague 5)...
IN THIS HOUSE LIVED FROM 1956 TILL 2008 PRAGUE AUTHOR WRITTING IN GERMAN LENKA REINEROVÁ
https://vimeo.com/118587516This documentary was shot during Holy Week at Kalwaria Zebrzydowska, where every year the faithful take part in the traditional Mystery of the Passion, recreating "in action" Jesus' way to Golgotha. Completely devoid of commentary and musical illustration (we only hear religious songs accompanying the procession), the film is an extraordinary ethnographic impression of the most important period in the Christian liturgical year.
The Souvenir from Calvary was made in 1958 and was read at that time in two ways. 1/ Also as "exposing the darkness of the simple people", and for this alleged message the film received an award at the Moscow Festival. 2/ For its real humanistic and ethnographic qualities at the same time, the work was appreciated by the jury of the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, which awarded it the Grand Prix.
A color-coded testimony of a bygone era. The magical world of a folk marketplace. Groups of imposters, specialists in black magic, home-grown inventors, and charismatic healers are gathered among the stalls. A colorful world, full of figures of the Blessed Virgin Mary, gingerbread hearts, and ointments for all ailments.
The picturesqueness and expressiveness of the stories unfolding in his artworks, often bordering on the absurd, lead to his classification and identification with the Czech Grotesque School.
Němec’s The Flames of Royal Love (1990) is a veritable explosion of bottled-up filmmaking energy, adapted from Czech philosopher and proto-surrealist writer Ladislav Klíma’s novella The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, published posthumously in 1928, and long a dream project for the director. A tawdry, raffish fairy tale centering on the hypergamous marriage between a cleaning woman (Ivana Chýlková) and a prince (rock star Vilém Čok) that quickly descends into a grudgeful war of wills, its content is very “Once upon a time…” but its setting is distinctly contemporary, with architect Václav Aulický’s rather infamous Žižkov Television Tower, a real-life science fiction monument still under construction at the time of filming, playing the royal residence.
Němec, like Herz possessed of a pronounced black comic streak, created the decadent and deranged monarchial mishegas of The Flames of Royal Love in collaboration with consulting artist Michael Rittstein, turning contemporary Prague into a loose, louche world of nauseous glut and clutter. Born 1949, Rittstein had came to prominence during the ’80s through a series of large canvases defined by Baroque exorbitance; searing, unnatural colors; painfully distorted figures; and, often, a sense of domestic stultification. With the likes of Jiří Sopko and Jiří Načeradský, Rittstein has sometimes been identified as part of a mini-movement, the so-called Česká groteska or Czech grotesque school, often framed as a response to the stultifying political climate of Czechoslovakia in the ’80s.
Something like a “Czech grotesque” school has its own storied history in the cinema, as the examples of Chytilová, Němec, and Herz profusely show, though the living links to that tradition are disappearing fast. Chytilová died in 2014, Němec in 2016, Herz in 2018, and Czech or Slovak artists possessed of their particular perspective, having both predated and outlived the Iron Curtain, so-called, cannot be replaced. What remains are their visions of excess, inundated with the obscenities of the system, whatever the system or regime of the moment might happen to be.
https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/dispat ... vary-2019/
On first sight it would seem to be a satirical work poking fun at Prussian militarism and the degenerate Junker class, for which Klíma harbored a profound contempt. Though this aspect is certainly present, there is also a noticeable resemblance to the “gothic” or horror novel. Klíma deliberately tries to evoke powerful emotions and feelings of terror in the reader. Sudden reversals are attended by a mix of motifs both fantastical and rational, and the reader’s attention is cleverly engaged by mysterious phenomena. One might believe, if not establish, that Klíma was influenced by Walpole, Lewis, Scott, Hoffmann, and Poe and directly inspired by Lautréamont, in whose wake he found himself in close proximity to the Surrealists. This is suggested by another conspicuous feature of the novel: black humor. It is a drastic, sardonic, grotesque humor, the harshness of which is leavened by subtle irony and self-irony. Klíma’s place in literary history should properly be located, then, amid all the related currents that flowed into Modernism and that through Surrealism grew into absurdist literature.
Yet these analogies relate to the external aspects of Klíma’s work. The author himself gives us a deeper understanding of his intent and the true meaning of all the novel’s blackness: “The finale of everything isn’t ‘nothing’ but something more horrible, more incomprehensible, shapeless, monstrous, black – and a celestial refulgence. – I invoke the heart of the world as ‘Black Radiance,’ ‘Black Illusion.’” From this it may be concluded that he conceived the novel primarily as philosophical, that primacy was given to the ideas he wished to convey.
Klíma greatly enjoyed writing fiction, and he devised several literary techniques that, thanks to other authors, later became part of the collective heritage of twentieth-century prose. Behind all these experiments, however, stood his philosophical thinking, skillfully encoded under a fictional veneer. He did not disown his philosophy in his fiction, rather, he was of one mind with the dictum of his great paragon, Nietzsche: “I write my works with my entire body and life.”
The reader unfamiliar with Klíma’s philosophy likely will not suspect that his game of constantly shifting dream and reality, fantasy and reality,
illusion and lucidity is not just a whim or literary experiment, but the expression of his metaphysical thinking. His is a vision of extreme
subjectivism: the world is the creation of the individual’s imagination, his plaything; in relation to the world man is a god, is God, directing
everything; his will is the highest law, he himself is absolute will. This produces a dialectic of paradoxes. Everything can change into its opposite:
truth into lies, lies into truth, logic into illogic; no fixed border exists between dream and reality, life and death. The reader is always left in doubt
as to whether Helmut is dreaming or is awake, perceiving reality or suffering from hallucinations, and whether Helga is dead or alive. “At one
moment lunacy can seem like reason, at another, reason like lunacy,” Klíma writes. It is only mildly inconsistent, and an obvious concession to literary convention, that at the close of the novel the protagonist – who is essentially an ironical and parodic variant of Klíma’s god-man longing for
the stars – is revealed to have indeed gone mad. All the tempestuous events and horrifying visions have only been figments of his diseased mind. In
Klíma’s other work the endings are usually left open, a metaphysical question mark hanging over them – as it did over his life’s thought.
— A Prince Longing for the Stars (by Josef Zumr)
my (belated) reply is, "yes, the hero attempts to fornicate with his deceased (and decomposing) wife even in the film!"does he do the same thing to his wife's newly dead body in the movie that he does to it in the book?
oh but in the book (unless i'm remembering incorrectly) he does even more than that to herickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 11:20 pmmy (belated) reply is, "yes, the hero attempts to fornicate with his deceased (and decomposing) wife even in the film!"does he do the same thing to his wife's newly dead body in the movie that he does to it in the book?
(he, uh... deposits something... unpleasant... into her mouth 
)All this was not quite, in the fullest sense of the word, gentlemanly or gallant. Yet it was vital to show her that I was not a “mangy dog.”
huh, when i was in my early teens, together with my best friend/first great love/carnal torturess, i developed a complicated theology/metaphysic/whathaveyou (details of which i remember nothing) that we named 'black sunshine'. this was no doubt based on a conflation of aleister crowley (who washed up in retirement in a nearby local coastal town, hastings, that my parents, comparing it to the more vibrant brighton, simply designated as a place where junkies went to die - so naturally as a gloomy child i was very drawn to that rotten decaying old smuggling town that crowley lazily damned in later life) so a conflation of crowley, and all the old pagan countryside rituals that were still enacted in various festivals that seemed perfectly normal at the time but now looking back on seem insane. (mostly dressing up & setting fire to & parading idols whilst very very drunk)ickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Thu Apr 15, 2021 10:48 pm 2/4
IN THE FLAMES OF ROYAL LOVE (Jan Němec, 1990)
I invoke the heart of the world as ‘Black Radiance,’ ‘Black Illusion.’”
And also, since we are in the middle, i was too freaked out to mention it the other day when i got there, but the last lines of the literature-sick novel i was reading (that i reviled at first, but as usual came to utterly identify with) seem pertinent (i have a problem with last lines, i always think i should pay attention, they mean so much! but then i'm concentrating so hard that i understand nothing and it could be that i've never actually finished any book at all, anyway:Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
[etc]...............
...............
Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But flying
In the distance, far away, beyond everything, like a mirage of salvation rising from the void and the abyss, the sea was visible, with its shoals, swarms of white, triangular sails. 'Prague is untouchable,' he said, 'it's a magic circle, Prague has always been too much for them. And it always will be.'
(although some of the old paperbacks are beginning so smell a bit now, so it's stinky dreams when i finally do crack them open)btw. on Monday i picked (in one of the local second-hand book shops) ALL COLORS OF THE SUN AND THE NIGHT (by Lenka Reinerová) and started to read it.ickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Thu Apr 08, 2021 9:28 pm The related text (upon which the film (BE SURE TO BEHAVE) is based) by Lenka Reinerová was published under the title "Alle Farben der Sonne und der Nacht" or "All Colors of the Sun and the Night" or "Todos los colores del sol y de la noche". Written in 1956-57, first issued in 1969 (immediately all the copies destroyed), in 2001 reworked and reissued.
here are some further details...its content is very “Once upon a time…” but its setting is distinctly contemporary, with architect Václav Aulický’s rather infamous Žižkov Television Tower, a real-life science fiction monument still under construction at the time of filming, playing the royal residence.
i started to study architecture in 1992, i.e. in the year of the tower's competition.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDi%C ... sion_Tower
The Žižkov Television Tower is a unique transmitter tower built in Prague between 1985 and 1992.
In 2000, ten fiberglass sculptures by Czech artist David Černý called "Miminka" (Babies), crawling up and down were temporarily attached to the tower's pillars. The sculptures were admired by many and were returned in 2001 as a permanent installation.
whenever the royal halls have sloping walls and tall narrow windows with rounded corners, it's inside Ještěd Tower...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Je%C5%A1t%C4%9Bd_Tower
Ještěd Tower is a 94-meter-tall television transmitter built on the top of Ještěd mountain near Liberec. It is made of reinforced concrete shaped in a hyperboloid form. The tower's architect is Karel Hubáček... It took the team three years to finalize the structure design (1963-1966). The construction itself took seven years to finish (1966-1973).
3/ tunnel...https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dripstone-wall-2
Constructed at the behest of Albrecht von Wallenstein between 1623 and 1630, the Wallenstein Palace enjoyed a centuries-long first life as a magnificent private residence for various generations of the Wallenstein family.
Despite the elite negotiations that have always taken place inside the palace’s handsome corridors, it is the Wallenstein Palace’s massive network of complex, geometric gardens that remain the biggest draw for the public since 2002. Fashioned in an early baroque style, the grounds were partitioned into several distinct areas, the most secluded and fascinating of which was known as “The Grotto.” In this portion of the garden, aspects of real and artificial elements of nature co-mingle, creating an eerily unreal landscape. Here, grotesques were allowed to reign supreme, including imagery of snakes, monsters, and random, distorted faces, while an aviary provided a crucial acoustic element.
Contemporary visitors to the Grotto remain most struck by the Dripstone Wall, created by things that, from a distance, seem to be dripping skulls. Closer investigation reveals the wall is made from a haunting, uncanny assemblage of stalactite-like rocks. Signs along the wall note that, if one stares hard enough, it’s possible to make out human and animal faces peering out from within the wall’s recesses.
some of you might remember that i mentioned Vítkov Hill while speaking about a local futile attempt to make out of the dead Comrade Klement Gottwald a mummy (in the 1950s). so, the mummy was supposed to be installed on top of the Hill and the tunnel goes through the Hill.Some call it the Žižkov Tunnel, others the Karlín Tunnel; it depends which side of the tunnel you decide to take first. The most accurate name would be the tunnel connecting Žižkov and Karlín. Or Karlín and Žižkov? Anyway, it's up to you to choose which end you'll take first!
The tunnel is 300 metres long and runs under the hill of Vítkov. At first glance, it may seems rather dodgy, but don't be afraid, it's a good hideaway from rain or even a possible catastrophe! It was originally built as an antinuclear cover, this part of the tunnel still being in operation. The one thing you can't hide from in here are your very own problems. Jitka from the film Loners seeked comfort here, Ofka from Night Owls came down to vent her anger, and Karel Hrubeš, the main investigator from The Velvet Killers, ran through it and met the love of his life on the other end. And what purpose will the tunnel serve you?
https://www.zemefilmu.cz/en/film-locati ... ov-tunnel/
yea, Žižkov TV Tower is "late brutalism meets late hi-tech".
i like local "cubist" architecture and it is most likely that if i would be supposed to be a guide to someone unfamiliar with Prague and interested in architecture i would drag him/her first into the Museum of Cubism situated in one of the local "cubist" buildings.
it is a place where one can fathom the local obsession with "cubism".https://delveintoeurope.com/cubist-museum-prague-guide/
Cubist Museum Prague Guide – one of the best niche museums in Prague
