Report on the The Party and the Guests - KarazwLaimoon

Title: A Report on the Party and the Guests
Director: Jan Němec (Czech Republic)
Released: 1966
Language: Czech (Eng S/T)
Duration: 1 hour and 11 min
Key Actors: Ivan Vyskocil, Jan Klusák, Jiri Nemec

   

Interesting Links about the Film:
Trailer on YouTube: Click Here
IMDB Click Here
Vertigo Click Here
New York Times Click Here
Electric Sheep Click Here
Movie Mail Click Here
EEFB Click Here

Synopsis: (adapted from IMDB Click Here)

Distinguished by being "banned forever" in its native Czech Republic, Jan Němec's "A Report on the Party" is a great film from the flowering of the Czech cinema in the 1960s. It is a political thriller that satirizes unquestionable conformity. A group of happy picnickers are accosted by a group of strangers led by a bullying sadist who has an unbreakable hold over his followers. After he interrogates one of them, a stranger then invites everyone to a nonsensical, but elegant and formal banquet outdoors. Němec documents the process of self-deception and rationalization which lead to an acceptance of constraint; free will and freedom are seen as difficult to maintain and easily discarded. The affair is bizarre, and ends when one of the guests (played by film director Evald Schorm) chooses not to remain and escapes. His compatriots agree that he must be recaptured, and the group arms and hunts him down. The film concludes with the nightmarish barking of search dogs.
Written by Fiona Kelleghan <fkelleghan@aol.com>

Director: Jan Němec (adapted from Wikipedia Click Here)
Němec's career as a filmmaker in the late 1950s when he attended FAMU, the most prestigious institution for film training in Czechoslovakia. At this time, Czechoslovakia was a communist state subservient to the USSR and artistic and public expression was subject to censorship and government review. However, thanks largely to the failure of purely propagandist cinema in the early 1950s and the presence of important and powerful people within the Czechoslovak film industry, such as Jan Procházka, the 1960s led to an internationally acknowledged creative surge in Czechoslovak film that became known as the Czech New Wave, in which Němec played an instrumental part.