Jan Nemec

Jan Nemec was born in Prague, in the Czech Republic, on July 12, 1936. Although he loved jazz and planned to pursue music, his father persuaded him to find another artistic pursuit, filmmaking, so he enrolled in the prestigious Film School of his city, FAMU, where he had other classmates, later famous filmmakers in the golden years of the Prague Spring, such as Jirí Menzel and Vera Chytilová .

The young Nemec graduated in 1960 with a vigorous short film, A Loaf of Bread , a short story that adapted a short story by Arnost Lustig . Nemec must have liked this author very much that for his feature debut, after being Martin Fric ‘s assistant , he turned to Lustig again with Diamonds of the Night ( 1964). With hardly any words and with little more than an hour of footage, the filmmaker demonstrated narrative power by recounting the escape of two young men through the forest from Nazi hands, in the years of World War II. Shot in black and white, it was a very physical story but also hallucinating and strange, with some scenes of a hand and a face crossed by ants that reminded us of Luis Buñuel ‘s cinema.. Nemec had learned to love that cinema, as had that of other directors such as Robert Bresson , Alain Resnais , Ingmar Bergman , and Federico Fellini .

After making a segment of the collective film Las perlas del fondo del agua (1966), his next film, La fiesta y los invitados (1966), surprised even more. The adventures of several friends on a picnic in the woods, who run into a strange group of thugs, was interpreted as a surreal criticism of the communist regime that prevailed in Czechoslovakia. Even the translation into English with “party” to refer to “party” was thought to also allude to the “party” that imposed the rules of the game in the country. The Soviet invasion was a jug of cold water for Nemec’s desire for freedom and artistic creativity. His film would be buried, and after The Martyrs of Love , from 1967, his career was frustrated.

Unlike Milos Forman , who left the country, he stayed until 1974 and did what he was asked to do, television work for his second wife, the singer Marta Kubisova. Efforts like The Prague Oratorio (1968), about Soviet tanks, could not meet the desired diffusion. The desire to adapt Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” went nowhere; a screenplay collaboration with his distant cousin Vaclav Havel, Heartbeat , just in 2004 and would partially use it in an autobiographical video titled Landscape of My Heart . In the United Kingdom he would go on to make a curious documentary, Peace in Our Time?(1988), where he was very critical of the English position of Chamberlain –caricatured by John Cleese– who handed over his country to the Nazis before the war. It gives an idea of ​​Nemec’s prestige that Philip Kaufman came to him as a consultant when it came to adapting Milan Kundera ‘s novel in The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988) .

After the Velvet Revolution, Nemec returned to his country. There he continued making films, but with little impact, such as Code Called Rubí (1997) and Toyen (2005), this one about the surrealist painter Marie Cherminova. The feeling is that political events twisted what promised to be a great film career.