Diamonds of the Night: Jan Nemec

4/6/14 to 4/23/14

Join us for this long-overdue survey dedicated to Jan Nemec, a true iconoclast. We present early films that helped define the Czech New Wave, including a new print of his debut feature, Diamonds of the Night from 1964, as well as recent work made after his return to the Czech Republic in the 1990s.

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Past Films

Diamonds of the Night
Sunday, April 6 5:30pm
Jan Nemec (Czechoslovakia, 1964). New Print! Pure cinema at its leanest, Diamonds has only a few lines of dialogue and no real “plot” as it follows two boys escaping a Nazi concentration camp train. A brilliantly stylized, expressionist nightmare in film form. With short, A Loaf of Bread. (75 mins)
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Late Night Talks with Mother
Wednesday, April 9 7pm
Jan Nemec (Czech Republic, 2001). This experimental-video counterpart to Kafka's Letter to Father finds Nemec turning a fish-eye lens on himself and Prague to create an experimental personal essay film. Followed by free screening of Nemec's1975 feature, Metamorphosis, a rare, made-for-German-television adaptation of the Kafka tale. (120 mins)
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A Report on the Party and Guests
Friday, April 11 7pm
Jan Nemec (Czechoslovakia, 1966). Archival Print! Sinister thugs blithely interrupt Sunday countryside revelers and start taking names, in Nemec's notorious parable on conformity and rule, banned “forever” by an incensed Czechoslovak government. With short, Mother and Son. (80 mins).
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Pearls of the Deep
Friday, April 11 8:40pm
Jan Nemec, Vera Chytilova, Jaromil Jires, Jiri Menzel, Evald Schorm (Czechoslovakia, 1966). Archival Print! Representing a who's-who of the Czech New Wave, this omnibus adapts the stories of Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, whose work embraced the nation's many outsiders, dreamers, and drunks. (107 mins)
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Sunday, April 13 2pm
Philip Kaufman (U.S., 1988). BAM/PFA Collection Print! Adapted from Milan Kundera's novel, this grand romance begins during the Prague Spring of 1968 and stars Daniel Day-Lewis as a philandering surgeon. With Jan Nemec's Oratorio for Prague, which chronicles events following the Prague Spring. (200 mins)
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Toyen
Wednesday, April 16 7pm
Jan Nemec (Czech Republic, 2005). A love letter from one outsider to another, Toyen is a fittingly fragmented, dream-like tribute to the painter Toyen, a key figure in the Czech Surrealist movement who lived under Nazi occupation in Prague. (73 mins)
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Martyrs of Love
Friday, April 18 7pm
Jan Nemec (Czechoslovakia, 1967). Archival Print! Three interwoven tales of the lovelorn are brought to life in Nemec's romantic work, inspired by the visions of the Czech Surrealist Group and the streets of Prague themselves. Photography by Miroslav Ondrícek, Milos Forman's regular cameraman. (71 mins)
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Ferrari Dino Girl
Wednesday, April 23 7pm
Jan Nemec (Czech Republic, 2009). Nemec returns to the Prague Spring and his own Oratorio for Prague with this oblique look at memory, love, and politics. Followed by a free screening of the recent Czech TV documentary on Nemec and the Czechoslovak New Wave, Golden Sixties: Jan Nemec. (136 mins)
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Diamonds of the Night: Jan Nemec

4/6/14 to 4/23/14

“If one lives in a society which is at its core illiberal, it is the duty of every thinking human to attack this lack of liberty in every way he can,” declared Czech filmmaker Jan Nemec in 1968, just before his film A Report on the Party and Guests was “banned forever” by his government. “The Czech New Wave filmmaker who posed the greatest danger to the establishment” (Michael Koresky, Criterion), Nemec studied film at Prague's famous FAMU film academy along with compatriots Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, Jiri Menzel, and many others. His debut feature, Diamonds of the Night, introduced a pure-cinema aesthetic grounded in fantasy and nightmare, influenced by Kafka, the Czech Surrealist movement, and the all-too-real paranoia of the political state around him.

His films “make one realize just how valid and necessary absurdism, especially the austere absurdism of great dramatists like Beckett or even Pinter...

His films “make one realize just how valid and necessary absurdism, especially the austere absurdism of great dramatists like Beckett or even Pinter, is,” wrote Renata Adler in a 1968 New York Times article. Nemec explained, “This is what appeals to me most in films-the possibility of discovering the secrets of man's subconscious and dreams. But a pure film should be interpretable in itself; it should have its own aesthetics and poetry.”

Nemec's desire to capture the nightmare that Czech reality had become soon collided with the events surrounding the Prague Spring, where a government loosening was answered by a Soviet invasion and a crackdown by the new puppet state. Unable to work in his own country, he fled first to West Germany, where he made the Kafka adaptation The Metamorphosis, and then to the United States, where he lived and worked for over a decade (including here in the Bay Area). Undaunted, he returned to his newly liberated homeland in the 1990s and began filming again, this time with a series of provocative features and digital-video essays.

Still fighting, still filming, Nemec remains one of cinema's true iconoclasts; his visionary works of the 1960s stand as some of the greatest raised-middle-fingers against power ever made, while his new pieces continue his idiosyncratic search for liberty, whether in society or merely in dreams.

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Presented as part of a North American tour, which premiered at BAMcinématek in New York as Independent Reality: The Films of Jan Nemec. The retrospective is produced by Comeback Company, curated by Irena Kovarova, and organized in partnership with the National Film Archive, Prague; Aerofilms; and Jan Nemec Films.