Funeral Ceremony (Czech, 1969) 68 mn B&W DIR: Zdenek Sirovy. SCR: Zdenek Sirovy, Eva Kanturkova. MUSIC: Jiri Kalach. DOP: Jiri Machane. CAST: Jaroslava Ticha, Josef Somr, Jana Vychodilova.
Another filmed banned in the Czech republic for 20 years (see The Ear and Larks on a String), this stark hour-long fable concerns an elderly farm woman who wants to bury her husband at the cemetery in the city from which they were banished. The first third details her trials in dealing with the bureaucratic red tape to bury her husband. The middle flashes back to many years before, in which we learn why they were exiled: at a meeting, he had a few choice words about the collectivist mindset. The last segment is thereby rather anticlimactic, however you realize that her old foes have softened up. She gets her husband the proper burial, but also the townsfolk turn up en masse to pay their respects. In its implicit way, perhaps this is what angered the government. They didn’t want the public to feel that dissidents would eventually be forgiven for their opposing views. Perhaps too, his ex-townsfolk silently looked up to the man for standing up against something they knew to be wrong, but had to blindly defend. What is most effective throughout is the cutaways to extras- she always feel she is being watched, and in time, the viewer feels the same way. This was shown on TVO’s program Film International, in a month-long retrospective of previously banned films, in a very scratchy print whose imperfections seemed fitting for the subterranean feel of watching a suppressed film. Its flickering images are evocative of an underground silent movie. Its primitivism goes a long way in enhancing the mood.
Originally published in “Short Takes”, Vol. #1, Issue #11. This column, which randomly collected capsule reviews of films, for once had a theme: all the movies were previously broadcast on Jay Scott’s Film International program.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.