The Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film, 1958–89

January 12–February 25, 2023

A series of stark, scathing, and playful films from the former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, where absurdity was a fact of life under authoritarian rule—and a source of cinematic creativity.

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I Hate Mondays
The Witness
What Would Happen If . . . ?
March, March! Tra-Ta-Ta!
The Barnabáš Kos Case

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Past Films

I Hate Mondays
Tadeusz Chmielewski
Poland, 1971
Digital Restoration
Thursday, January 12 7 PM
This lighthearted comedy turns a dysfunctional Warsaw into a slapstick playground worthy of Jacques Tati, balancing criticism and lyricism in its portrait of the forgotten details of daily life in a socialist state. With Roman Polanski’s Two Men and a Wardrobe.
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Case for a Rookie Hangman
Pavel Juráček
Czechoslovakia [Czech Republic], 1969
Digital Restoration
Saturday, January 14 7 PM
Juráček imaginatively adapted part of Gulliver’s Travels into a sci-fi journey through socialist Czechoslovakia. The film’s allusions to uncomfortable truths caused it to be “banned forever.”
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The Barnabáš Kos Case
Peter Solan
Czechoslovakia [Slovakia], 1964
Digital Restoration
Friday, January 20 7 PM
A humble triangle player in a city orchestra unexpectedly winds up its party director and, engorged with a taste of power, soon becomes a tyrant in Slovak director Solan’s droll send-up of authority and hypocrisy.
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March, March! Tra-Ta-Ta!
Raimondas Vabalas
USSR [Lithuania], 1965
Digital Restoration
Wednesday, January 25 7 PM
A Baltic Duck Soup about the dispute between two nations over a desert borderland, this ambitious, playful film makes colorful fun of fascists and imperialists, patriotism and dogmatism, in a burst of creative satire made the same year as Dr. Strangelove. With Jan Švankmajer’s The Garden.
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The Witness
Péter Bacsó
Hungary, 1969
Digital Restoration
Friday, January 27 7 PM
A bumbling protagonist fails at a series of assignments before finally showing defiance in this recently restored Hungarian classic, whose acerbic humor and political critique made it renowned in the Soviet bloc. “As broadly entertaining as it is bold” (New York Times).
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Four White Shirts
Rolands Kalniņš
USSR [Latvia], 1967
Sunday, February 5 7 PM
An idealistic singer in a fledgling Latvian rock band fights censorship and indifference in this inventive musical, which earned comparisons to the French New Wave. With Gyula Gazdag’s The Selection, a Hungarian take on the intersection of socialism and rock and roll.
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What Would Happen If . . . ?
Gerhard Klingenberg
East Germany, 1960
Sunday, February 12 7 PM
Released the year before the building of the Berlin Wall, this farce imagines the relocation of a village from East to West Germany. With Vlastimil Venclík’s Czech short The Uninvited Guest about a couple confronting—then growing accustomed to—an intruder.
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The Reenactment
Lucian Pintilie
Romania, 1968
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick
Sunday, February 19 7 PM
The police force two friends to reenact a drunken crime on-screen—with awkward results—in Pintilie’s masterful satire, voted best Romanian film of all time in a poll of Romanian critics.
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The Asthenic Syndrome
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1989
Saturday, February 25 7 PM
Legendary director Muratova’s demented chronicle of the absurdities and insults of post-glasnost Soviet life takes its title and cues from a psychological condition that alternates between maniacal aggression and apathetic inaction. “A movie that breaks all the rules” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).
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The Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film, 1958–89

January 12–February 25, 2023

Absurdity was a fact of life in the socialist republics of Eastern Europe, from the end of World War II until—for most of these countries—the revolutions that began to transform the region in 1989. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the former “people’s republics” from their repressive regimes, this program, originally scheduled in 2020 but postponed due to the pandemic lockdown, features works from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former East Germany, and both parts of the former Czechoslovakia, most in West Coast premieres of digital restorations from their national film institutions. As the series shows, the shared sensibility of the absurd unites these diverse nations and their films.

The Eastern European sense of the absurd brewed over centuries when peoples of the region could not determine their fates. In the twentieth century, the absurd overflowed in the gaps between the ideals and realities of their socialist states, between the happiness citizens were supposed to enjoy and the material hardships they faced. It was a response to the failures of public services, the pretenses of public life, the sense of physical and spiritual confinement, the ruination of the landscape, the fantasy of escape, and the search for daily dignity within regimes that refused to admit any flaw. More so than in Western Europe, the absurd was a personal, concrete, everyday experience in the East.

These films evoke the liberties that Eastern Europeans only intermittently enjoyed in the twentieth century and that again feel fragile in the twenty-first. Glossy or stark, scathing and playful, these movies express the ludicrousness of authoritarian rule through creative varieties of absurdity.

—Gabriel M. Paletz, Guest Curator

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Film Series Sponsors: Jim and Ruth Reynolds

We are grateful to Gabriel M. Paletz, who teaches at the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic, and the following archives and institutions for making this series possible: Národní Filmový Archiv and Athanor, Film Production Company (Czech Republic); WFDiF and Index Film Studio (Poland); Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum (Hungary); Slovenský Filmový Ústav (Slovakia); Centrul Naţional al Cinematografiei and Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Romania); The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center (Ukraine); Lietuvos Kino Centras (Lithuania); DEFA Film Library and Deutsche Kinemathek (Germany); and Nacionālais Kino Centrs and AKKA/LAA (Latvia).