Cinema Then, Cinema Now; Death Is Called Engelchen

Hi, welcome to Cinema Then Cinema Now, the film series with lively discussion. I'm your host, Jerry Carlson, and I teach Cinema Studies at the College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. Today, we continue our five-part series that we're calling Scrambled Time. It's about films that challenge linear storytelling. Today, we'll be seeing the 1963 Czechoslovakian film, Death is Called Ingolchen. It was directed by Jan Kaddar, who's perhaps best known in this country, for his Academy Award-winning film, The Shop on Main Street. The film we'll be seeing today was made several years before that, and in the opinion of a number of film historians and critics is a superior film. It's a World War II story, it's a story of a partisan who is recounting to himself many of the things that he did over the period of the war.

We'll be talking about it as an example of Scrambled Time film, and as an example of the Czech New Wave, and a number of other things after today's screening. As usual, we have two guests, today they are Professor Albert Todd of Queen's College, and Professor Hannah Arya Gafeman of New York University. Enjoy, Death is Called Ingolchen. Hi, welcome back to Cinema Then, Cinema Now. I hope you enjoyed Death is Called Ingolchen, an extraordinary film I think, along film but an extremely rich film in its psychological portrait, not only of the central character, but of many of the characters surrounding him.

Before we go on to place this film in a set of traditions and talk about it, let me introduce today's two guests. Sitting to my left is Professor Albert Todd of Queen's College of the City University of New York, Bert teaches a number of courses there in Russian literature and language. He is a distinguished translator, working many of you may know him for his work on You Have to Shinkos, Poetry and Pros, and he teaches a number of courses in Russian and Eastern European film at Queen's College. Over to my right from another part of New York University culture is Professor Hannah Arya Gaefmann, Hannah is a professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at NYU, where she is a specialist in Slavic poetics and in modern Czech literature. Hannah, let's stick with modern Czech literature just for a second or so. This film is taken from a novel, I'm not familiar with the novel, who's the author and

where does he fit in some general way in modern Czech or is it Slovak literature? First of all, it's Slavak literature and La Gislafniatico is one of those long-form terrible of Slavak literature. And this novel in particular was one of the first raising doubts and questions and him having trouble, was the Czech regime, the Czechoslovak regime, then still quite Stalinist. The La Gislafniatico became more or less legal again in the later 60s, visited Israel in 67, went back to Europe in 68, and then left again Czechoslovakia when the Russian scheme, I don't know right now where he was at, but he's one of those people who at least in the novel was challenging the official ideology in the 60s and through the 60s.

The second question about the relationship of this film to general context of modern Czech literature or the narrative arts is, is there a tradition in Czechoslovakia and literature of this kind of temporal displacement in plots, you know, in the West when you take a college course, perhaps if you're helping change these things these days, and certainly Miland Kundra has made a few of his statements about how these things should be changed. The general story you get is, well Faulkner Joyce and Virginia Woolf, they changed a lot of things in the 1920s. Are there some other people we should be giving a lot of credit? Well, we shouldn't forget that there are two Prague authors who have determined the central European literature to quite a, quite an extent, and it's German writing of the Franz Kafka, of course, used Czech at least in his private correspondence quite a bit,

and the Czech author, Yaroslav Harshak. And they both played with time and space quite, I would say, imaginatively and definitely would not be put to shame either by Joyce or by Virginia Woolf. And both, as you know, died in the very early 20s, so they were really, right. So they're really there at this moment, moment of this. Okay, well, I think I'd like to check as Bert now about it, certainly different kind of context for it. Bert, you and I actually, on one or two occasions past, did some talking about the traditions of representing war, that sort of thing in Russia and in East European film. Well, this is a film about a partisan. What do you think of as some of the cliches of filmmaking about revolutionary leaders or partisans?

And how does this film, in your mind, avoid those or does it? Well, yes, it does, in a certain dimension, the leadership here is a human eyes and they're frail and they do make mistakes, and one of the underlying themes of the film, which comes out dramatically at the end, is that war is a time where people make mistakes. And the mistakes that they make cannot be undone, they have terrible consequences. And the leadership is showmaking mistakes. The Russian commander at one point is playing around with a weapon that he doesn't understand. It explodes and for frivolous reasons, he is killed and a number of others are killed or injured. The other leadership faults or fails at several times in understanding who is the enemy or what the situation is. And at one point, however, to counter, right, pose the issue of tradition, which does appear here, I think, in very traditional forms, also, the Russians have to all do play

a dominant role. Moscow is calling Moscow, it starts with Moscow as being in charge and we, the role of the Russian leadership is clear throughout the operation, both of the espionage and the partisan activities themselves. The commander of the partisans, though it's a Czech brigade, is a Russian, and there are several other Russians in the unit. And the leadership of the Russians is very sure at all points. They never let anything escape. This is probably historically correct, but there are implications there that are probably not true. Right. But also, I would like to come back to the point you made earlier, and that is that the Russian leader is killed. First of all, he's the one who does not say, well, why would this fellow be a collaborator? And then second of all, he's the one who ends up in the terrible destruction when, as

you say, dealing with this weapon that he doesn't understand. But most of all, I think he fails to understand within the film what I think is the central or a central theme of the film, and that is the plight of Martha, the fate of woman. One is after all, the heroic figure in this film, more than anyone else, and her sacrifice is the greatest. And the mistakes that are made by others that they pay for are greatest in her case. She says once to her lover, friend, the narrator of the film, the wounded Czech leader, she says, Pado, she says, you're crippled, but you're going to walk again. And I will always be a cripple for what she has done. She will always be maimed for sacrifices. It's very great. But the Russian commander specifically does not understand this over the issue of whether the suspected spy is trying to be recruited by the partisans is really genuine or not. He shows his scars and says, yes, yes, here's proof that I'm who I am, and they seem

to or want to accept that. And the Czech and Pado doesn't want to accept that. The Russian says, but would a man let himself abuse this way, just to be a spy, and the Czech says yes, but what about Martha, who did not accept that, and the Czech says, and the Russian was replied to that, and she doesn't count, and yet short. Which, well, no, please go on. Sorry, but I think that she doesn't count in a different way. Yes. I think he actually understands her very well. She is really above us all. She's willing to sacrifice everything, and she does. That's why we also do, believe at least at the beginning, that she's dead, and she actually does attempt suicide, because she has sacrificed everything. Yes, and he's the one that says that she's worth more than all of our everyday together. So that the Czech spy cannot really be compared to her, and in fact, she does not find

her way back to that Czech society. And she doesn't return, she's lost. How do you understand the end of the film, though? Is she ever to be found? She lost forever. She has to find her own way, because there is this wonderful reversal. She comes to cover as rules, quoting from the book of rules, not finding actually sheltering him. It's the first time that he finds quiet. He finds peace with her. And when she is supposed to find her peace, she leaves. So it's the reverse of the casting, just to continue on the line of this, and the sort of traditional representation of heroic partisans in the war experience. Of course, everybody suffered, but suffered so there would be a conclusion, and the future

would be clear in a certain kind of way. But one of the things that's very interesting about this film is that one, we know that she has survived, we first assume that she is not Arthur, but she survived, but her particular fate, and how she will be able to work it out in a post-war society, is left open. We know it internally. She will have that. So that's not closed at the end. And Englton has escaped himself, and a Pavel goes off looking for him, but that last shot of Pavel is not one, is not the traditional cowboy walking into the sunset. It's a crippled man hobbling down the street, looking for a war criminal, who clearly has had a set of advantages that he has not had. And this is the scene that follows his encounter with the mother, the old village woman whose house was destroyed, and she now waits or tries to get some cement to rebuild her home.

That actually these people who were helping the partisans have lost everything, and they have to start again, and it's not quite clear how well they will succeed. And I kind of feel that the real motto is Pavel's sentence when the doctor asks him, what didn't you suspect this, check, guy as being a spy, I mean, how? What did you do? So as well, you know, the problem is that whatever you do, you make mistakes. And this in a way is also extremely revolutionary in the world films of Eastern Europe at that time, even raising doubts about the righteousness and brightness of the partisans, the fact that they deserted the village and let these people die and the village to be burnt, and when they come back, they say, yeah, behaved at the moment terribly. This is interesting to me in the context of the hospital, and the way in which the hospital

is this clean, as it's represented, is this clean, well-run environment. It would presumably suggest that the society will be like this, well-run, in this way afterwards, and yet trapped in this bed, of course, he's reliving all of these experiences. I'm, it's fascinating to me how the space of that single hospital room is used in so many different ways, even the bed, the camera is positioned so that it can either be something quite beautiful and clean and healthy, or it can be a side of almost expressionist distortion of internal feelings, that strikes me as being linked to what you were talking about earlier, this instability that we find in this world, it's a moral instability, it's not characteristic of a lot of the other war films.

And it's in the hospital once again that the theme of woman is restated because the nurse is one of the three principal women characters, and she's portrayed in a complex role. We don't fully understand, I don't know if the novel ever reveals her background, but we don't really understand her character, but her own confusion, her own loss, and her own inability to solve what are her problems, right, are well pronounced in there, yet at one point where Martha has come back to him in the hospital, and then his to leave says goodbye forever, Pavel tries to stop her, and there's this marvelous shot where the two women are in the frame together, facing each other for just a moment, and we see the woman who suffered so very much who is the horror, as she said, I've been a horror spy, and next to her is the beautiful angel, if you would, to introduce a theme that I think

is running through there, the angel of goodness, and they're thrust together, and he is trying to and cannot help or deal or answer or gain from either one of them what he wants. Oh, yes, and they both leave him, yes, that's very interesting because the way in which the nurse begins as an idealized angel, you mentioned something earlier about the humanizing of the patriot partisan hero, but the environment of the hospital is something in which we see her, the nurse none, increasingly humanized through her contact, and she really comes out of a world of idealized behavior, and of course there is the intimations of a kind of erotic awakening, the scene with her, the taking off of the hat and the looking, which

is not treated as good or bad, it's not good, she's waking up, she shouldn't be a nun, rather it's this impact that the encounter with someone whose experiences have been so profound as Pavel's are, that's how I take it. Oh, yes, and the way she responds to Pavel's admonishment to her the day of victory when the world is celebrating, that she should go out, she should take off this costume and put on something else, anything that's as long as it's different, and grow out and do something she's never done before, embrace the first man that she meets, these words come to her with such force and her response to them or a revelation of the degree to which she is tormented and unhappy and unfulfilled person. But at the same time, we have to remember a game, this is a movie produced in Czechoslovakia

in 1963, and to have a nun as such a heroine, is really quite unexpected, and with all the questions, she has more inner moral support from her religious life, she's torn, she's hesitating, but she says, everybody is in the streets, I have to stay here. She's making the sacrifice. She is, and she has some kind of a moral integrity, in that situation, she has her obligations. Well, this had a brings me to this interesting point, two nuns, right? We have Marta who has sacrificed everything, and we have the Catholic nun, now of course Marta is at least hinted at that she's Jewish, in the novel it's much clearer that she's Jewish. He should. Yes. Of course, this encounter of any kind of a problem. And of course in a not fully post Stalinist Czechoslovakia of 63, you have two marginalized

kinds of women, a woman defined as Jewish, and a woman defined as a member of a religious order. Well, what I'm interested in, we talked about the moral instability of this, but this is also a film that destabilizes our interpretations of so many, not of the events and characters. I'm thinking of the initially of the opening of the film, the way in which it to me reveals the method of the film that we see the attack upon the house of English and twice. And we not only do we see it twice, but with that, to my mind, extraordinary roving camera that they're using. We experience it twice, I mean, we're in the house with Pavel, and so much of its point of view shots as he's making the discoveries and looking through the rooms.

But those opening scenes to me are emblematic of this narrative method in the film that almost any incident we come to is inevitably going to be challenged, how we initially took it in that. Do you think that's, well, that definitely, one would say that Khadhar and Yachkur realize subverting every initial ideal, initial situation, after all, Ankhran's house is empty. The only person we actually see is Maltha, who we think is dead. And Pavel is not shot in a combat or in a real fight. He's shot in his back the last day of the war. And he's saved by a real collaborator, who is trying to save his own skin. So there is, everything is somehow being subverted, we could almost say it's the predated deconstruction, right?

Yeah, that is presented as being deconstructed. Let's just talk about Maltha for the second. I assume, along with Pavel, that when he discovers her that she is dead, and so the shock is that she comes back. And just when you think the film is going to not have its full courage, that, okay, they're going to bring her back, somehow they'll get to get together, you know. Then she comes in and she tells us about how she cannot escape her own suffering and goes off to this unknown fate of contemplation and not allowing them to get back together. Well, again, it's the subverting of the possible happening, but it's also the subverting of the role of a woman, we don't have one single young happy woman in that film. We have this young girl in the house who is having affairs with all the partisans, who is a very likable character after all, she does follow them, and she pays with her life

by following them. And she does so out of kindness, because she wants to make them happy, exactly. It's not an kind of, there is no moral judge, please. We have the old woman who accepts them as they are, and never judges them. We have Martha, and we have the Sister Elizabeth, the nurse. So there is no idealised, socialist, realist, mother, wife, and sister, none of that. But there is an extraordinary film that we've shown in this series before, Andric Tarkovsky's Ivan's childhood, unusual in a whole set of ways, but there is a sort of aborted romance, not a fair romance in it between an officer and a, I believe she's a member of the medical court, therefore she's an officer in the Soviet army. And there is, in that relationship, these hints of suffering, hints of what we would now

jokingly call burnout, I mean battle fatigue, or whatever, yet all of that is within the bounds of remaining heroic, and really not overstepping quite as ultimately an extremely conservative and puritanical moral code, that is there will be a lyric walk in the woods together, with something a bit strange about it, because as a longing they can't express there. Now that strikes me as, I am to admire Tarkovsky's Ivan's childhood extremely, but that's quite different from presenting a woman who is, I think you were being so, so kind of saying, having affairs with all the, the, it's sleeping, but yet seeing that in the very concrete context of what the life of these partisans are, and what the possibilities of happiness are, there's something philosophical about it, it's quite concrete, what

can you offer if you really want to do something for them? And she jumps out of that bird to iron his pants, right? I don't quite know whether it's the iron vis-a-vis the checks, how's my, or is it, there's infinite kindness, because she does get upset that he wants to be elegant for Martha, right? Yes, yes, yes, and there is, there's that, well there's that strange operation of the sort of normal jealousy under these extraordinary conditions, but it's that the camp follower, kind of hard to camp follower, is now getting jealous about his visit to the spy prostitute, and yet this is all as if they were, you know, it was one girlfriend upset about going to the other girlfriend, and that dissonance is what makes it, because it's not normal. I mean, there are circumstances are so terrible in the, in the film. Well, we might extend the proc, iron is, or whatever, how about calls the proc, iron is

to the Slovak, iron is the thing that this is a classical example of this kind of seeing the funny or the comic and those tragic situations, right? Right. Yes. Now, let me stick out with this context of how an audience would receive, that would have received this film. This film was a critical and popular success, that's not what I'm really interested in. Kaddar and his partner, Klosh, were in trouble any number of times. Well, now here's a story about a brave suffering partisan, et cetera, but I think we both know that World War II has not always in Czechoslovak film been only World War II. How would, what other ways of reading this film do you find? Well, there is, of course, the subtext of the 50s and the collaboration was, was the regime and it's was the Stalinist trials, right?

And there is, of course, the hero Pavel, where the subtext to it would be the Czech, actual invented hero, Julius Fuchik, who was according to the latest sources of suspicions of the double agent. Okay. Well, who was he before we knew he was a double agent? Well, he was a very famous communist journalist in Prague. Then he was a member of the Czech communist underground, was imprisoned, tortured and final, executed during his imprisonment. He has written what is called the reportage on the gallows, which these little letters were smuggled out by a policeman. Now, when I was asked, how could this guard or the policeman in prison agree to smuggling out this stuff, and this was life and denturing, on the other hand, also how could this man

and danger his God? Right. Did he really think himself that important, I mean, this became the, this monumental document of heroism, right? Okay. In the situation itself, it was, it was absolutely ridiculous to have, and danger someone else's life just to get your own story out. Okay. So. And in fact, there is a suspicion that these things were not at all written, in prison, but were written by his wife after the war. For self-promoting. Well, there was a need for a mythological hero. Right. The Czechs did not have that many members of the underground to have documented hero, right? So this would be, so to a Czechoslovakia and audience in 1963, this would be a very obvious reference.

I mean, we were talking about taking apart a mythologized hero, and the whole mythology, of course, of the ideal partisans, the mythologized hero, the beautiful, young, strong, courageous, wonderful, active. And of course, situational, like this, the one where Steve was the German officer who goes actually to the village, to look for milk for his soldiers, and they catch him. And Pavel discussed the officer holds a novel by Thomas Mann, a forbidden author. And it's again the role of a book of an author that is introduced here, and we know how literature has been treated in totalitarian regimes, not just under Nazis, we are reliving it right now. It's not by chance that Havel is such an important figure in Czechoslovakia today. And Pavel is struck by that, and he has a whole philosophical discussion, was this officer,

and this officer refers to the Kant, too. And reinterprets Kogito Ergo Sum, until, as long as he dank had been, I managed, as long as I think I am a human being. Pavel takes this book and sees that the novel was taken from a library of a Jew, and at that moment he's taken by anger, he stops thinking, and then he is capable of shooting this officer. He sees this to be a human being for that moment. You know, but let's talk again about this 50s, sort of referent, because one of the things that both of you have talked about is the fact that this film does say in certain situations everyone makes mistakes. Right. And so I think you can very easily, happily, easily, you can read all of the mistakes of the repression of Stalinism of the 50s, right onto this.

I mean, partisans who are making hard decisions are, please correct me if you think I'm wrong, identical in a certain reading to party members who are making hard decisions under Econa, given the international situation of the 50s, and yet they're going to make decisions that needlessly make people suffer and are going to be wrong decisions. I have to go even further, because these protestants made mistakes, but still try to, they were one of the few who were fighting the Nazis, the dictatorial regime, if the Paul is the Stalinist regime, right. And after all, we're in 63, and that's already allowed to think of the early 50s as not the ideal period of Czechoslovak history, then the questions are, well, the fellow travelers. Okay.

We cannot name those fellow travelers now, or go any further, because our 30 minutes are up. If you'd like more information about cinema than cinema now, or about cinema studies, graduate or undergraduate, drop us a line, drop it to cinema than cinema now, the college of Staten Island, Staten Island, New York 10301. Let me give you that information again, okay. Up at two, cinema then, cinema now, the college of Staten Island, Staten Island, New York 10301. Well, Bert, thanks for bringing your expertise here about this extraordinary tradition of filmmaking. We should all know more about, glad to have you back on the show, Hannah, pleasure having you for your first visit on the show, and with your wide-ranging knowledge of things modern and check. Hope to see you again. Well, as usual, I hope that our thought and discussion here lead you to thought and discussion at home that you enjoy.

Thank you.