Bruce Loeb on Piano (Takovy je zivot). This relatively little-known film is in the genre of late-twenties/early-thirties German realist films including Mother Krausen's Journey Into Happiness, and in the league of such great late silents as Sunrise. The story of a Prague washerwoman who maintains a peculiar vitality despite her troubled family life and exhausting poverty is a loose-knit narrative drawing variously on near-documentary location shooting in Prague; a dazzling montage reminiscent of the Soviet silents; and a transcendent lyricism, particularly in the death scene. Vera Baranovskaya (from Pudovkin's Mother) stars, along with Theodor Pistek, who produced the film when German financial backing fell through. Such films remind us that the low-key, even deadpan humanism of a Milos Forman (not to mention the neorealists) had its precursors.