Evento

A Report on the Party and the Guests

Red Renewal: Seattle's Socialist Spring

Apr 23

(Jan Nemec, Czechoslovakia, 1966, 35mm, 70min)

Wednesday, Apr 23 at 09:30PM

In Czechoslovak maverick's Jan Němec's most politically charged film, a group of middle-aged bourgeois friends picnic in the woods; soon they are assaulted by thugs who interrogate them, until the party's host intervenes. This examination of the mechanics of power and the ways people participate was banned in Czechoslovakia by the Communist regime, who rebuffed Němec's assurances that it was not intended as an allegory of their government.

In collaboration with Ester Krumbachova (who also contributed to the script) and in the visual style of Vera Chytilova's Daisies, Nemec's absurdist yet universal film placed him in the ranks of the Czech avant-garde, and was selected for the 1968 New York Film Festival, in defiance of political pressure at home.