Smutecní slavnost (1969) User Reviews

A lesser-known Czech masterpiece

[pocketapocketaqueep · 10/10 · 12 May 2014]

I took a punt on this having heard of neither the film, nor the director, nor indeed the novel it is based upon, or the writer herself. Short, powerful, and broken into three parts that shift between two periods of time, it is that rare thing, a realist piece plain and simple, with none of the modifiers that trouble that term from time to time. The social realism of a Ken Loach, for example, may not be so oxymoronic as the socialist realism beginning to glut the cinemas in the Stalinist lands of the period on display here, but it is forced nonetheless, as would be immediately evident if the few short mentions of collective farming in Smuteční slavnost were compared to similar scenes in Land and Freedom or The Wind that Shakes the Barley. Here, the sparse dialogue appears at no point to serve any other purpose than carrying what the viewer feels to be these people's real intentions; and people, not characters or actors, they remain throughout. And who are these people? An admirably mulish widow, a craven priest, a handful of party functionaries, a crowd of farmers, a crowd of mourners, a handful of musicians, and one man who we see at first moribund, dead, and then vigorous with, though it may take a different expression, the same judicious defiance as his wife. They knew what they were doing when they banned it and since I walked out of the cinema less willing than ever to be pushed around or told what to think, I would say it has lost none of its force.

A masterpiece, a seed planted in a rich bed of doubt.

[mulgawire-1 · 17 August 2011]

This is a masterpiece. So exquisitely written and directed is the narrative and characterisation that it isn't until the very last scenes that we realise all we've been led to believe is untrue. Once you get it, like all the grieving townsfolk in the cortège, you have to review everything you saw to understand the brilliance of the light you've just seen. This film could only have been made within a totalitarian state. Distilled over years of censorious rejections, it had to get past the punishers and straighteners before it could be made. Only then, did these blinkered bureaucrats understand and appreciate the craft of the creative people behind and in front of the camera. See it and weep.

Outlanding expressionist consonance plot-Soundtrack and Cinematography

[figueroafernando · 9/10 · 4 July 2022]

Indescribable expressionist consonance between the severe and pitiful atmosphere of the plot with the soundtrack that it is, like an echo of a distressing type of dark angst and touches of atonal music; I think of Krystoff Penderecky, and other passages in Oliver Messian's "Crystal Liturgie", dour, covered in the silence of heaven. There is no doubt that even dying can cause envy by having a family tomb in that town from which he was ostracized for speaking freely against the Communist Party before he died. In any case, both the first part "The death of Jan Chladilov, (with the "alms" that she had to undergo in the form of viacrucis begging and begging for the transfer of the body of her husband's outcast, the grieving wife, Matylda), and the second, the transfer or departure from the town to that place where the family tomb is, demonstrates the opportunism of those who at the time, during the war, the dead man himself hid and helped and now they spit on him for being the "outcast of state" and they align themselves with the ideology of the prevailing government, but it also shows the deep dehumanization in order to save a plate of food and save themselves from jail, they do not hesitate to ignore their friends or even relatives. The second part is the crude background , Jan's eviction from his land. In fact, in the second part, when Matylda takes her alcoholic husband in a cart, the departure through the fields full of flowering trees with the music that sounds like Shostakovich transmits feelings impossible to put into words. The end leaves anyone speechless, if a simple agitator, alcoholic who shouted at the communist party and was banished, can cause a fuss and a crowd at his funeral, what will happen to men like Lojzk, and to those who carried out the banishment? And they even looted the very things and personal belongings of the outcasts?