Bruce Loeb on Piano The Rendezvous at the Mill, Crying and Laughing and The Fairground Sausage Vendor and the Poster Hanger-three 1898 slapstick vignettes and the first Czech films-have lost none of their popular appeal. They were shot by a photographer and self-styled architect, Jan Krizenecky, with Lumière equipment purchased in Paris. Rudi Fools Around and Rudi the Sportsman capture on film the proto-Dadaist spirit of cabaret performances reflecting the absurdities of modern life. (Rudi is the cabaret creation of Emil A. Longen, the pseudonym for Emil A. Pitterman, the painter.) Spontaneous location shooting among the throngs of bathers at Prague's riverside park in Rudi Fools Around, and at a track event in Rudi the Sportsman, make their caricatures of Czech obsessions all the more hilarious. Ahasver is a comic story, with character studies from bohemian Prague, centering around a woman artist seeking a model for her painting on the theme of The Wandering Jew. Visual non sequiturs such as a street-sweeping brigade all in business suits add a touch of the bizarre. The fusion of film and theater that attracted vanguard artists is evident in Czech Castles and Chateaux, made as a prelude to Karel Hasler's stage production Man Without an Apartment. The film has a harried actor racing from countryside to castle to Varieté stage (where the play awaits his entrance), hijacking every possible conveyance; in his final stretch over the rooftops of Prague he evokes the image of Fantômas. Prague Shining in Lights is an important entry into the City Symphony genre, documenting Prague's night-life at the height of the Roaring Twenties: a celebration of urbanity powered by electrical light. In We Live in Prague, on-the-street vignettes mix social documentary with dramatic interludes to fix Prague's landmarks with acrid observations: a poetic reportage on the beauty, banality, vulgarity and optimism of Prague's irrepressible urbanity.