Film-makers, in person, often come across so starkly different from the kind of movies they make. Often, ‘serious’ filmmakers goof around a lot and the ones making light-hearted comedies turn out to be hot-headed. And, there is Jiri Menzel, who personifies what literally drips from his films — humour.
When The Hindu met the Czech filmmaker at a city hotel on Friday, ahead of his being awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 21st International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), he was in a particularly ‘self-deprecating humour’ mode. The 78-year-old could very well have been the young station guard Milos from his 1968 Oscar winner Closely Watched Trains or Jan Dite, the restaurant waiter wishing to be a millionaire from his 2008 film I served the King of England .
The loud sounds from a celebratory band passing through the streets interrupts his words and he asks, “Are they celebrating because I am here?” Then, a burst of crackers happens, and he again asks, “Or are they bombing the place, because of that?”
The humour in his films is not the slapstick kind. Rather, it is the kind that hurts, which only those caught in tragic, hopeless situations can bring out, like the young station guard caught amid the German occupation of Czechoslovakia during World War II.
“Writer Bohumil Hrabal has told me that humour must always be a little bit tragic and also tragedy must be a little bit humourous. Humour is our life. If you observe carefully, we are all funny, in a way,” says Menzel.
Hrabal, one of the important Czech writers of the past century, has provided the material for six of his films, right from the early part of his career to the ones filmed after the turn of the millennium. The first of those was an adaptation of one of his short films, a project for which avant-garde Czech film-maker Vera Chytilova recruited him.
“Vera and I were classmates at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. We used to sit on nearby seats. She was a brilliant film-maker from the student days itself whereas I was a little more innocent,” he says.
Menzel, Vera, and their contemporaries from the academy, like Jan Nemec, came to symbolise the Czech New Wave, a short-lived movement that subsided when the Soviet tanks rolled in towards the end of the 1960s. While some of the film-makers left for greener pastures, Menzel stayed back, partly because he was more comfortable with the language and also because he wanted to stay close to the family. His broken English, though, has not been an impediment in communicating to the world outside through his films.
“When the Russians came in, they turned against all the ‘stupid artistes and the stupid writers.’ Only those accepting the Russian army were tolerated. They said Hrabal is no more a writer. He was a sensitive kind and it affected him quite badly,” he says.
Menzel’s own film Larks on a String , written by Hrabal, was banned in 1969, and saw the light of the day in Berlin only in 1980. Yet, Menzel is dismissive of the idea of his own cinema being political.
“There is no politics in my cinema. Nothing,” he says.
It’s time for the photographs, and the clown in Menzel is again out, dancing around, making faces and striking fake poses.
