Those Wonderful Movie Cranks

I always say that the 20^th Century brought two unfortunate events: the invention of the atom bomb and the invention of the sound film.
– Jiří Menzel¹

For many, the cinema of Jiří Menzel foremost carries associations with the literature of Bohumil Hrabal, whom he adapted six times for the big screen with great success; his second adaptation, Ostře sledované vlaky (Closely Observed Trains or Closely Watched Trains, 1966) even won him an Oscar. Hrabal’s work is riddled with characters given to great garrulousness – not for nothing is one recent compilation of his short stories entitled Rambling On: An Apprentice’s Guide to the Gift of the Gab (2014). He even wrote one novel, 1964’s Taneční hodiny pro starší a pokročilé (Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age) that comprises a single, peerlessly serpentine sentence of narration!

With Hrabal a contributor to the scripts of all of Menzel’s adaptations but Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále (I Served the King of England, 2006), which emerged after the author’s death, Menzel’s films have often been loquacious too, with characters prone to waxing lengthily tangential, to delivering meandering soliloquies laden with eccentric anecdotes and peculiar enthusiasms.

Menzel’s quote above, then, might seem contrarian – though in its droll dialectical fusion of one element of immense gravity with another that’s comparatively banal or ostensibly glib, it captures an ironic, bathetic sensibility common to Menzel and Hrabal.

Moreover, one really needn’t look hard to find echoes of silent-era cinema – and in particular, slapstick comedy – in Menzel’s work, whether in the Hrabal films or in his other, often lesser-known and lesser-exported films. Sight gags and slapsticky chase sequences abound – consider the jaunty, Movie Cranks-like piano that accompanies scenes of villagers farcically pursuing a boar down a country road in Slavnosti sněženek (The Snowdrop Festival, 1984), or any number of beautifully choreographed, comedic crowd scenes from I Served the King of England that could readily have had “Yakety Sax” soundtracking them.

Little wonder then that Menzel was commissioned to direct, and co-write with the Czech National Theatre’s Oldřich Vlček, a film to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Czech cinema. Báječní muži s klikou (Those Wonderful Movie Cranks, 1979) was made in collaboration with the National Technical Museum in Prague, and we might well surmise that said institution provided the production with the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe – a camera and projector-in-one – and the other period-evoking apparatuses we see in the film, along with sundry photographic and graphical elements.

It’s little wonder too that Menzel cast himself as Jakub Kolenatý, a figure modelled on Czech film pioneer Jan Kříženecký, even if he later considered casting himself to have been an error.² While it’s admittedly not among his more effervescent performances, it bears mentioning that his attitude towards his acting was often diminishingly expressed with his trademark irony, as when asserting that he often wound up acting by accident, à la his role as a psychologist in Closely Observed Trains, or as the magician and tightrope walker, Arnoštek in the Vladislav Vančura adaptation, Rozmarné léto (Capricious Summer, 1968).³ Curiously, Menzel’s tombstone in Prague’s Vyšehrad Cemetery bears the unmistakeable figure of Arnoštek…

In fact, Those Wonderful Movie Cranks – variously also rendered in English translation as Those Magnificent Men with Their Cranking Handles or Those Wonderful Men with a Crank, or as Magicians of the Silver Screen – contains several characters based on real figures, thinly disguised.

Probably still best known outside of Czechia for his indelible titular role in Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator, Juraj Herz, 1969), Menzel regular Rudolf Hrušínský plays Vilém Pasparte, a gently dissolute illusionist who incorporates moving pictures in his travelling father-and-daughter (Jaromíra Mílová) music hall variety shows. Based on Viktor Ponrepo, the operator of Prague’s first Biograf, U modré štiky (the house “at the Blue Pike”), Pasparte manages, through a high-maintenance sham marriage to Evženie Slavíková (Blažena Holišová), to falteringly become the proprietor of Prague’s first permanent cinema.

Incidentally, the name of Ponrepo lives on; the cinema of Národní filmový archiv (the National Film Archive) in Prague has been known since 1996 as Kino Ponrepo, notwithstanding that Ponrepo was the stage name for a man actually named Dismas Šlambor. Moreover, one of the first venues to open in Prague as a dedicated cinema after U modré štiky (1907) was the grandly beautiful, Art Nouveau Kino Lucerna (1909), which remains operational to this day.

Another familiar face, Vladimír Menšík plays ebullient cabaret artist and premier Czech film actor, Jára Šlapeta, who’s modelled on Josef Šváb-Malostranský, the star of some of Jan Kříženecký’s films. This was not Menšík’s first silent film-era adventure in sepia tone; he’s extraordinary as the lead in Oldřich Lipský’s Happy End (1967), in which early cinema-era play with the direction and speed of cinematic time – as demonstrated in Menzel’s film by projectionist Aloisie’s (Hana Burešová) oscillations between clockwise and counterclockwise cranking of the Cinématographe – is taken to an experimental, simultaneously forwards-and-backwards-running narrative extreme.

Menzel does superbly in Those Wonderful Movie Cranks to conjure the era in which “living photographs” truly were “the miracle of this century”, per the Art Nouveau script on Pasparte’s caravan. He captures the tensions between those, like the sober Kolenatý/Kříženecký, who fancied the new technology might yet be put to artistically valid ends, and those who wanted to make a buck (Pasparte/Ponrepo) and who moved in a bohemian demi-monde unpalatable to the moneyed classes. Betwixt and between, there’s the great theatre actress, Emílie Kolárová-Mladá (Vlasta Fabianová), who’s initially repelled by the idea that one of her performances should be captured on film and thus cheapened, and who has to be tricked by Pasparte for that to come to pass. Yet later, grasping that her star was waning, she has a change of heart and mind. After all, if it’s good enough for Sarah Bernhardt…

Menzel also captures something of a Czech “cultural cringe” – a battle to believe that anyone could be interested in seeing movies showing local scenes and personalities, when the norm was imported material from the States, or from Paris. The film is set, mind you, in a time where Czechoslovak nationhood – and by extension, national pride – is still well over a decade away, with the small matter of a World War having to occur first.

As for all of the silent films within the film which greatly elevate Movie Cranks’ nostalgic power to transport viewers to the silent era, Menzel noted:

We had to shoot the old films. The real old ones were unusable […]. The biggest gag is that some smart critic wrote […] that the plus side of the film was that it used little-known slapstick comedies. The idiot did not realise we’d shot [them] ourselves.⁴

It’s a testament to Menzel’s great skill as a filmmaker – along with that of his regular cinematographer Jaromír Šofr, editor Jiří Brožek, composer Jiří Šust, production designer Zbyněk Hloch, et al – that such brilliant mini-films-within-the-film as the hilarious short gag film, “Tragédie dans le Bois de Boulogne” wholeheartedly convince as productions of that era.

Curiously, there’s long been a sizeable corpus of Czechoslovak cinema inspired by and/or concerned with early and silent film. Oldřich Lipský’s oeuvre is riddled with silent-era callbacks, with the most explicit being his similarly-set Vzorný kinematograf Haška Jaroslava (Jaroslav Hasek’s Exemplary Cinematograph, 1955). There’s also the retro-futurist cinema of Karel Zeman, who was dubbed “The Czech Méliès” for his ingenious, fantastical and Vernian trick cinematography. Jan Švankmajer’s work carries echoes too, not least in his dialogue-free feature, Spiklenci slasti (Conspirators of Pleasure, 1996). But for a film to really transport the viewer to turn-of-the-century Prague, and to the birth of cinema itself, as an industry and an artform both, you won’t find better than Menzel’s little-known gem from 1979.

Báječní muži s klikou/Those Wonderful Movie Cranks (1979 Czechoslovakia 90 min)

Prod Co: Filmové studio Barrandov Prod: Miloš Brož Dir: Jiří Menzel Scr: Oldřich Vlček, Jiří Menzel Phot: Jaromír Šofr Mus: Jiří Šust Sound: Milan R. Novotný Ed: Jiří Brožek Prod Des: Zbyněk Hloch

Cast: Rudolf Hrušínský, Vlasta Fabianová, Blažena Holišová, Vladimír Menšík, Jiří Menzel, Hana Burešová, Jaromíra Mílová, Josef Kemr, Oldřich Vlček, Josef Somr, Vladimír Huber

Endnotes