Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains

CHAPTER 11 TRAINSPOTTING: JIŘÍ MENZEL’S CLOSELY WATCHED TRAINS A 1963 graduate of his country’s film school (FAMU, or Faculty of the Academy of Dramatic Arts), the Czech Jiří Menzel spent the next two years working as an actor and assistant director. His first motion picture as a director was a contribution to an anthology film titled Pearls of the Deep (1965), based on five short stories by Bohumil Hrabal remarkable for their concentration on the destinies of little people on the edges of society. (Evald Schorm, Jan Němec, Věra Chytilová, and Jaromil Jireš were the other contributors, making Pearls of the Deep a kind of omnibus of the Czech New Wave, also known as the Czech Renaissance.) Menzel’s first feature, his masterpiece Closely Watched Trains (1966), is also his chief claim to a firm place in the history of Czech cinema. This picture, adapted from a Hrabal work as well, received an Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film and was also the biggest box-office success of all the New Wave works in Czechoslovakia. As the Hrabal adaptations suggest, Menzel was influenced by Czech fiction writers rather than Western filmmakers. Except for Crime in a Nightclub (1968), his reverential parody of American musical comedy, his films prior to the Soviet invasion of 1968 are adaptations of novels or short stories by Czech authors. These include Capricious Summer (1967), from a novella by Vladislav Vančura; Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains, “The Death of Mr. Baltisberger” (segment from Pearls of the Deep), and Larks on a String (1969); and Josef Skvorecký’s Crime at a Girls’ School (1965). The subject of all these pre-1968 pictures is sex. In a sense, Menzel’s entire oeuvre is one continuous eulogy to sex—a subject at best tolerated at the time by Marxist aestheticians in Czechoslovakia. The “crime” in Crime at a Girls’ School, for example, turns out to be not murder but the loss of virginity, and the “philosophical” ruminations of the three elderly Don Juans in Capricious Summer are directed at a young female artiste. Considering that sex has always been the most dangerous enemy of puritanical political revolutions, Menzel’s message is clear. Menzel, like many good directors outside the United States, is also co-author of his screenplays; in the case of Closely Watched Trains, he collaborated with the author of the novel himself to produce the final shooting script. However, the adaptation of Hrabal’s prose, which is based on an uninterrupted flow of speech, on monologues in which the word (in its nicety or refinement) has enormous significance, is not a simple matter. The narrative itself of Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains functions on several levels: ridiculous aspects of life are permeated by cruelty, tragedy, and pathos as well as tenderness; and time is treated freely, with the reader being led, without obvious transitions, into various depths of the past. Menzel nonetheless succeeded 117 Chapter 11 in transposing this multi-layered story into an art form with a visual foundation. He retained almost all the conflicts of the original narrative at the same time as he translated the action into a linear time sequence, arranging the succession of events according to his own needs. In the process, Menzel necessarily sacrificed a number of hrabalesque details that had almost begged for inclusion; not allowing himself to be seduced by Hrabal’s magical lexicon, he consistently pursued a cinematic mode of expression. That mode—except in the black comedies Crime at a Girls’ School and Crime in a Nightclub—is essentially realist, and could perhaps best be described by the theories of André Bazin: Menzel, that is, reveals rather than describes reality. There is very little in his work of the formalist elements of moviemaking, and if, occasionally, there are some (as in the opening montage of Closely Watched Trains), they are used mainly for comic effect. Despite dropping the achronological structure of the novel from which he adapted Closely Watched Trains and replacing it with a linear narrative, Menzel makes inventive use of subtle symbolism in the film (e.g., the clocks and their chiming), as well as elliptical editing, and replaces hrabalesque naturalism with the lyrical understatement of Jaromír Sofr’s black-and-white cinematography. He also does excellent work with the actors, both professional and non-professional. (He himself plays a small part in the film.) Figure 30. Jiří Menzel: Closely Watched Trains, 1966 (Czechoslovakia) 118.

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