Jakubisko's first feature was the first film to turn international attention to the Slovak branch of the Czechoslovakian new wave, which was "rooted in more natural, and wilder, soil" (A. Liehm). This is a shimmering black-and-white adventure in cinema style, but control is the operative word here; the hand-held whirlygigs and stop-motion effects are just naughty cousins to the painterly framing and imaginative mise-en-scène that are already Jakubisko's stock-in-trade. Truly a portrait of the artist as a young man, The Crucial Years introduces us to the director's alter ego-played by Jiri Sykora, who will reappear as the Hamlet-like Yorick in Birds, Orphans and Fools-and many of his evolving themes in nascent form. The film follows two brothers, the artist Juraj and the pilot Andrej, through the "years of Christ"-between 30 and 33, symbolically the years between youth and reason-when they question their lives (Juraj his art, Andrej his marriage) and fall in love with the same woman. (The ménage à trois will be played out again in Jakubisko's work.) Juraj finally comprehends that life is made up of "love, foolishness and death" as he enters the so-called age of reason. As if to prove the point, the film was banned with the Soviet invasion of 1968.