Jiri Menzel, 82, lauded for his work as a film director
You might think Czech director Jiri Menzel, having spent much of his life behind the Iron Curtain, wanted nothing more than to be free of it. But Menzel knew the value of having limits to test.
“There were great films made under censorship, even in the United States, for instance when they were not allowed to show kissing,” he told The East European Film Bulletin in 2013. “Freedom has this unlucky side effect that by making everything possible, you lack purpose and a direction. Creation always needs limits.”
Menzel won international acclaim and an Oscar for his first feature, “Closely Watched Trains,” in 1966, a time when he and other directors — including Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova and Ivan Presser — tested authoritarian limits under Communism in Czechoslovakia.
The movement, which became known as the Czechoslovak New Wave, was muzzled when Soviet troops marched into the country in 1968, a crackdown that began a period of creative limbo for Menzel. But he reemerged, directing movies known for irony and humor. He also had substantial careers as an actor and a stage director.
Menzel died on Sept. 5, his wife, Olga Menzelova, said in a post on Facebook. He was 82.
Menzelova did not provide details, though Menzel had been in poor health for several years and had brain surgery in 2017.
Menzel generally set his movies in small towns and kept them subtle and light. “Closely Watched Trains,” told of the goings-on at a sleepy station where trains passed through bringing supplies to German troops during World War II. “My Sweet Little Village” (1985), which like “Closely Watched Trains” was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign film, is a bumpkins-versus-abureaucrat tale. His last movie, “The Don Juans” (2013), was about a smalltown troupe’s attempt to stage the Mozart opera “Don Giovanni.”
“Humor is the most important thing,” he told the
India Blooms News Service when that movie was making the festival rounds, “whether it is life or cinema. Violence is depressing.”
Menzel was born on Feb. 23, 1938, in Prague. His father, Josef, was a journalist and children’s book author, and his mother, Bozena Jindrichova, a tailor. His father was an intellectual but his mother — as he put it, was “normal.”
“I always try to make a movie that I won’t have to be ashamed of in front of my father, but also one that my mother would understand,” he told Reuters in 1987.
His first interest was theater, he said, but he also became interested in film while at the Film and Television School of the Academy of Performing Arts, where he studied from 1958 to 1962 under the director Otakar Vavra. Chytilova, a classmate, provided his first film acting credit, casting him in a short, “Strop” (1962).
He directed several shorts of his own before “Closely Watched Trains,” which was based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal. The film seems to be a gently humorous coming-of-age story until, in its fast-paced final minutes, it ends explosively, as the young hero blows up one of the German trains.
“What’s most clever about the movie,” Richard Schickel wrote in reassessing it for the Criterion Collection in 2001, “is the canny way Menzel and Hrabal deceive us, lead us into believing, right up to the end, that their aim is nothing more than a sort of chucklesome and offhand geniality.”
When the 1968 invasion put an end to what is often called the Prague Spring, many of Menzel’s contemporaries in filmmaking left the country. Menzel stayed, and felt the grip of authoritarianism — “Larks on a String,” a film about the re-education of several bourgeois characters under Communism that he completed in 1969, was deemed unacceptable and not released until 1990.
Menzel, though, took some theater-directing assignments, and eventually found enough favor in the eyes of the authorities that he was allowed to return to filmmaking.