Jon Mirsalis on Piano (Takovy je zivot). This relatively little-known film, featured in our Czech Modernism series, 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. Such films remind us that the low-key, even deadpan humanism of a Milos Forman (not to mention the neorealists) had its precursors.