Jiri Menzel, Oscar-winning Czech film director, dies at 82
Oscar-winning Czech film director Jiri Menzel has died aged 82 after battling serious health problems for a long time, his wife Olga Menzelová said on Sunday.
“Our dear Jiri, the bravest of the brave. Your body left our mundane world in our arms last night,” she wrote on Facebook.
Menzel won an Academy Award for the best foreign language film with Closely Watched Trains, a second world war drama, in 1967.
Born on 23 February 1938, Menzel studied film direction in Prague, graduating in 1962. In the 1960s, he was one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave of cinema, alongside another Oscar winner, Milos Forman.
Closely Watched Trains, based on a novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, was Menzel’s first feature film.
Hrabal became an endless source of inspiration for Menzel, who shot the bittersweet film Larks on a String in 1969, based on Hrabal’s novel. The film depicted the life of people sidelined by the communist regime ruling in then-Czechoslovakia.
Menzel shot the film in the wake of a political meltdown known as the Prague Spring, a loosening of communist influence that was crushed by Soviet-led armies in August 1968.
The film was banned by authorities, and it only returned to the screen after communism was toppled in the Velvet Revolution of 1989.
It won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin international film festival in 1990.
“I always admired in Hrabal the ability to look at people and see them as they truly are, with a truly uncompromising perspective, but he still loved people,” Menzel said.
Menzel was also a prolific theatre director, as well as an actor and writer, and was awarded the French title of Knight of Arts and Letters.
Menzel’s other films based on Hrabal’s books include Shortcuts (1981) and The Snowdrop Festival (1984). Sweet Little Village from 1985 earned
him an Oscar nomination.
After the Velvet Revolution, Menzel filmed The Beggar’s Opera (1991) using a screenplay by former Czech dissident playwright and later president Václav Havel.
In 2006, he shot his last film inspired by Hrabal, I Served the King of England.
“Good comedy should be about serious things,” Menzel once said. “If you start to talk about serious things too seriously, you end up being ridiculous.”