Milos Forman's first film combines two short features-Do We Need All Those Brass Bands? (a.k.a. If There Were No Music) and The Audition. Together they provide a key to Forman's style as it was to develop in Loves of a Blonde and The Firemen's Ball: his delicate, insightful, often cruel and usually hilarious treatment complements a strong cinema verité mood left over from the short films' non-narrative, documentary origins. "His style...was simple: focus the eye of the camera as closely as possible on human detail, and then put on the screen, in uncensored form, everything that turns up as a result of such a microscopic view...(What appeared was) a merciless portrait of the whole fabric of society, the likes of which Czechoslovak film had never produced before" (M. and A. Liehm). Both segments deal with the "generation gap" (to which subject Forman would return in his first American film Taking Off), the first in a tradition-bound provincial brass band competition, the second among amateur singers vying for a spot in a Prague cabaret show. Competition is co-scripted by Ivan Passer.