Czechoslovak cinema flowered during the 1960s New Wave, producing sharp, playful, often subversive work like Daisies and The Firemen's Ball before Soviet-led normalisation cut the movement short. That mix of dark humour, folk surrealism and quiet political courage runs through much of what the country produced. See what Macca made of it below.
Rating: 1.5★
Czech cinema had a remarkable and tragically brief flowering in the 1960s and early 1970s. The movement now known as the Czechoslovak New Wave produced a string of films that pushed hard against the constraints of state-sanctioned socialist realism, using allegory, surrealism, and a loose, improvisatory energy to say
1970s
René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973) is one of those films that doesn’t really fit anywhere: too cerebral for kids, too odd for animation festivals, too steeped in European political theory for the Saturday-morning slot, and too visually fearless to ignore. A 72-minute French–Czech co-production
Genre Comedy
★★½ — Daisies (1966)
Genre War
★★½ — Men Without Wings (1946)
Genre Comedy
★ — The Firemen's Ball (1967)
Genre Animation
★★★ — The Pied Piper (1986)
Genre Animation
★★½ — Virile Games (1988)
Genre Documentary
Pictures of the Old World (1972)
Film images and data courtesy of TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
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