Tennessee Williams on Stage & Screen in New York -Festival Begins December 9th
Some Like It Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder - Coming in February
5 Chillers in the Universal Cult Horror Collection on DVD
Robert Redford in Downhill Racer on DVD
Ballast - Lance Hammer's Critically Acclaimed Drama
Z - Costa-Gavras's Oscar-winning Thriller on DVD

PRIVATE CENTURY - 5 Decades of Czech History Covered in an 8-Part Series on DVD

Jan Siki's Private Century (2006), a string of eight 52-minute episodes shown as a mini-series on Czech TV, was never meant to be devoured at a single sitting. Yet watching it is akin to immersing oneself in a sprawling historical novel chronicling a family being tumbled and humbled from the 1920s through the 1960s. The family is Czechoslovakia, rendered up close and personal by a handful of families that lived through the upheavals of that convulsive period. Their individual histories, stitched together by Siki into a sweeping yet intimately detailed tapestry, is drawn from masses of home movies, photos, letters and journals. It's a stunning piece of editing, both technically and in terms of the particularly Czech sensibility Siki brings to it.

As befitting a son of the land of Kafka, Siki describes Czechoslovakia's passage through the 20th century as a history of constant assault on human identity. Repeatedly, he plays rueful narratives gleaned from surviving family members against what would be typical, even banal, home movies the world over – picnics, family parties, holidays, lakeside frolics -- to establish a melancholy counterpoint between transient pleasures and wrenching changes. Some are existential – the waning of passionate young love – but the heavy hand of geopolitics is never far away, whether extended by Germany or the USSR. Apart from its home-grown difficulties, Czechoslovakia has survived having had to live with two invading 800-pound gorillas in its tent – Nazis and Communists -- at often heavy cost.

It isn't long before we ask ourselves who filmed the footage we see. Only a handful of Czechs – the prosperous, the educated, sometimes both simultaneously – can have owned movie cameras with which to document themselves. As, for instance, the extended Seisser family of the first two episodes – Daddy and Lili Marlene and The King of Velichovky. The latter refers to the family's patriarch, Karel Seisser, a German-speaking Czech of the Sudentenland buffering Czechoslovakia and Germany to the northwest. Of humble origin, he used his wife's dowry to establish a prosperous farm, where he was a hands-on presence as well as lord of the manor. A rotund, energetic extrovert, he enjoyed presiding over family gatherings, eating at the same table as his longtime workers, and spoiling his three daughters.

Enter Julia, or Lili, as she was nicknamed, a creature of charm, vivacity and dancing eyes, filmed adoringly by her husband, a dentist with a practice in Prague. If Private Century has a star, it's Lili. It becomes evident in the footage filmed in Prague in the '30s that Lili was built for fun. We see her shimmying at a party, face aglow, hugging a girlfriend at a costume party, exchanging flirtatious glances with another doctor who was for a time her lover. When the Germans invaded in 1938, Lili divorced her husband and married a German national, eventually leaving her daughter (who supplies the narrative) in the care of her father. This suited the little girl. Grandpa Karel, outraged, disowned Lili. After WW II ended, Lili's fortunes nosedived. With her new husband in a POW camp, Lili periodically sneaked back into Czechosloavkia to sell jewelry she had stashed there. The Communists seized Grandpa Karel's farm and deported him and his wife to Germany. There, we are told, he got a subsistence-level job in the agriculture ministry and never smiled again. The little girl, whose narration provides a dramatic fillip at the end, says her beloved father never stopped loving her mother, whom she describes as “a nice bitch.”

Assuming that fathers and husbands were the ones behind the cameras most of the time, it's not surprising that women are the dominant presences here, even as we're reminded of the thorny interface of Czechs and Russians in the film's last two episodes, Small Russian Clouds of Smoke and Low Level Flight. Like the first two chapters, they're linked, but facing east, toward Russia. The three-generation saga begins with Russian emigres, the Popov family, who prosper soon after fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution. The father's invention of machinery that weighed small quantities of tea and tobacco led to an ownership stake in a cigarette factory, and material comfort – stylish fashions and educations for the two daughters, rather less for the next generation.

Low Level Flight is in fact a scathingly metaphorical title. Tana, old man Popov's granddaughter, is captured in deliriously lyrical footage after she meets and falls in love with Vaclav (much of the lyrical, youthful times are reinforced by outdoor footage – these Czechs, including the Russians who saw no need to integrate into Czech society, enjoyed hiking, swimming and other outdoor pastimes). Vaclav was consumed by the desire to fly, which he did. In fact, we shudder at the footage of him in and around planes during his training and duty. This innocent, proudly exuberant, but forbidden documentation could have resulted in his death had his superiors authorities known of it. But the higher he flew, the lower the marriage sunk, until it crashed. What finished it was when Vaclav was sent to a camp outside Moscow, surrounded by barbed wire, where drink, promiscuity and wife-beating were commonplace. He drank more and more, slipped into extramarital affairs, and died at the age of 42 after passing out drunk in front of a heater and inhaling fumes. By then he was divorced and alone.

The saddest, bleakest stories may be of those who made their accommodations with the Communists and even prospered. Such as Vaclav Felix, central figure of the fifth episode, One Stroke of Butterfly Wings. Like most of the men in most of the stories, possibly because they were more public, more exposed, he lived a life of fear, despite thriving as a composer of musical kitsch calculated to inspire the masses and enrapture totalitarian regimes – Legend of Lenin, or Nation, Trust in Gottwald. His source of fear was his outspoken anti-Communist father, Eddy, an aeronautical engineer, fired and reduced to designing cowsheds, later imprisoned for writing a satirical spy novel, The Shark's Revenge.

Not far behind Felix fils is sculptor Vincenc Havel, central figure of the third episode, Statuary of Granddad Vinda. In his beret and white smock, chipping away in his studio, pausing to play the violin from time to time, he was very much an artistic figure, without, it seems, the soul of an artist. Quite willing to accept from the Party Committee and inhabit a small mansion described with tantalizing vagueness as “abandoned by Germans,” he worked away on quite conventional statuary and lived comfortably, even to the extent of owning a small car, on the strength of such works as Liberation by the Red Army and figures of Czech Communist top dog Klement Gottwald and, apolitically, composer Bedrich Smetana. But he railed about being stuck in the provinces, seemed narrow, rigid and autocratic, especially when he belittled and dismissed his daughter's efforts to design and make tapestries, in her words, “taking her courage away.”

The film also genuflects to a few whose courage wasn't taken away. If the film has one shot that crystallizes the life force, it's of Marie Sechtlova, reaching through a barbed wire fence to smell yellow flowers on a shrub in the sixth episode, With Kisses from Your Love. It also contains the most transportingly lyrical footage of young love as Marie and her husband-to-be, Pupa, clamber up and down hillsides, through birch groves, pausing to embrace (one wonders who was photographing them), lost in each other, joyous, vibrant. Here is love on celluloid as Hollywood spends millions to simulate and almost never comes anywhere near!

The Sechtls were no strangers to photography. His family had run a photo studio since 1886. She took to the family business avidly and quickly became so popular that families asked to book her for their weddings. After the Communists seized the studio, the Sechtls suffered. An employee ratted him out for making money on the side from freelance wedding photography. Imprisonment followed, and Pupa lost his spirit. The doleful account of their downfall is played against footage of a swimming holiday with a beachball as central prop. A little movie they were filming about a chestnut floating downstream never got finished. All they had left was the family archive, thousands of photographic plates. The Party seized them, too, possibly, Marie notes, because some contained pictures of locals who saluted Hitler, then later rose in the Party. She had just enough time to hide 10,000. The rest were dumped into the middle of a lake. “He was my first and final love,” Marie says of her husband. “That I was once so free seems so far away.”

No end of wistfulness informs the sole episode overtly linked to America, the fourth, See You in Denver. It stems from the circumstance that led to the downfall of the family it depicts. Frantisek Hvanhara owned a film distributorship in Prague before WW II, transporting rentals to theaters in a sidecar attached to a Harley-Davidson. He opened his own theater, only to have almost all his films seized by the Gestapo, including Murnau's classic 1922 Nosferatu. Inexplicably, they left the Westerns – The Mark of Zorro (1940), Texas Ranger (1936), When the Daltons Rode (1940). The latter, about Dalton brothers Bob and Emmet and their forays against railroads, became the Czech kids' bible. They made primitive little Westerns of their own, inspired, they preferred to think, by the Daltons. They knew every line of the film by heart. The title of this episode comes from one Dalton's line to the other when they split up to elude capture. In 1948, the theater was confiscated by the Communists. The downward spiral of the Hvanharas follows a familiar trajectory – father demoted, fired, death hastened by alcoholism; son drafted, discharged, convicted of “slander,” sentenced to forced labor in a uranium mine, finally emigrated to US and Canada with pal and siblings in 1969 (the home movie footage switches to color). Later, he documented a trip – half vacation, half pilgrimage – to Denver.

There's a lot to Private Century and Siki, aided by a brassy, stabbing Kurt Weill-like score connecting the segments, does a lot with it. Or, rather, seems to let it do a lot for itself. Perhaps most impressive of all is his ability to not let the characters be overwhelmed by their momentous backdrops. They and their lives in Private Century, embedded in vividly detailed matrices of personal and historical dynamics, are rich enough and resonant enough to fill a shelf full of novels.

For more information about Private Century, visit Facets Multi-Media. To order Private Century, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jay Carr