Review: Case For A Rookie Hangman (1969)
Cast: Lubomír Kostelka, Klára Jerneková, Milena Zahrynowska
Director: Pavel Jurácek
Country: Czechoslovakia
Genre: Drama | Mystery
Editor’s Note: The following review of Case For A Rookie Hangman is a continuation of Rowena’s Spotlight on the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Aside from his collaborations with Jan Schmidt, Pavel Juráček also struck out on his own for several of his films, among them Every Young Man (1965) and his very last film, A Case For A Rookie Hangman (1969). Juráček lived through to the 1970s and 1980s, but his circumstances differed from those of his colleagues like Miloš Forman who went abroad, František Vláčil who was reestablished after a satisfactory self-critique in 1975, or Věra Chytilová who was able to make a film again in 1976, following the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces in August 1968. For Juráček, the process of “Normalisation” imposed by the Soviets effectively ended his career in film either in a writing or directorial capacity.
Whether or not Juráček had an inkling of the impending stoppage of his career during the making of A Case For A Rookie Hangman, he holds nothing back visually and narratively to produce one of the most astoundingly elaborate, labyrinthine film satires of the period.
Juráček was actually a graduate of screenwriting at FAMU, not directing. But during the period of the Czechoslovak New Wave, Juráček struck a rather even balance between writing and directing for himself and writing in collaboration with other directors for their projects. Among his notable screenwriting credits are Icarus XB-1 (1963, Jindřich Polák), The Jester’s Tale (1964, Karel Zeman), and No Laughing Matter (1965, Hynek Bočan). He also featured among a group of writers who wrote Kinoautomat (1967, Radúz Činčera, Ján Roháč, Vladimír Svitáček), often dubbed the world’s first interactive film because at numerous points the film stops and offers the audience to choose which narrative trajectory to follow (produced for the Czechoslovak Pavilion at the 1967 International and Universal Exposition in Montreal, Canada). Whether or not Juráček had an inkling of the impending stoppage of his career during the making of A Case For A Rookie Hangman, he holds nothing back visually and narratively to produce one of the most astoundingly elaborate, labyrinthine film satires of the period. Little known and little seen, but if given the chance, a work that increases in resonance with each encounter and should be one of the significant Czechoslovak film references between the works of, say, Wojciech Has and Jacques Rivette.
“Encounter” is the operative word regarding the film’s inspirations and narrative. The film is loosely based on the third book in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), “A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Luggnagg, Glubbdubdrib, and Japan.” To assure this reference, following the film’s title is a statement from Juráček: “This film largely resembles the story called A Journey to Laputa and Balnibarbi, which was dreamt up in 1720 by Jonathan Swift. Should Swift be seen to have turned over in his grave, may his countrymen forgive me.” Juráček makes it seem as if his film is a close adaptation of Swift’s book. But aside from the basic details of place and character names and the broad thematic brushstroke of satire of the state, Hangman goes beyond the scope of Gulliver’s Travels with its strange, delicate combination of Juráček’s personal preoccupations of recapturing the wonderment of children/imagination and aspects of 1960s (post-invasion) Czechoslovakia. Hangman presents Lemuel Gulliver’s unexpected encounter with the geographies and populations of Balnibarbi and Laputa, a floating rock island, and the complications that arise from his foreign presence in these places. Providing a hue of romantic wistfulness to his journey is the memory of his love Marketá, who may or may not have died, and his encounters with a woman who looks like her and embodies multiple characters.
…this falling into the rabbit hole à la Alice in Wonderland is nothing less than one of the most stunningly choreographed sequences to capture the amorphous shape of dreams.
The film is divided into twelve sections, each one headed by a title. And while the opening credits are accompanied by images of woodcut drawings like the first pages of a classic book, the film’s literariness ends here. But such literariness makes all the more disorienting and exhilarating the film’s first fifteen minutes, which present how Gulliver literally stumbles into Balnibarbi. Unlikely obstacles on a country road; an off-the-beaten path; a dead hare dressed in clothes; an expansive, abandoned fairy tale-esque house; Gulliver’s poetic voiceover; kinetic camera and editing; and a funhouse-like flexibility of objects and thresholds, this falling into the rabbit hole à la Alice in Wonderland is nothing less than one of the most stunningly choreographed sequences to capture the amorphous shape of dreams. When Gulliver lands in a professor’s office and the professor writes on a piece of paper, “I am sorry, sir, but this is not a dream,” the film switches to sync sound and begins Gulliver’s interactions with the people of Balnibarbi. Not a dream, indeed, as Gulliver moves from one segment of Balnibarbian society to another, from one section of Balnibarbian to another, and sees a country partially in ruins. Yet when he asks Vilma, one of the people who guides him around, “You had a war here?” she shakes her head. He discovers other alarming details of Balnibarbian society: people migrating from the city to the forests, a scientist developing a thinking machine to spare people from doing so (too much), public executions that inescapably smack of Stalinist show trials and purges—for which he was initially in line—and a collective inferiority complex vis-à-vis Laputa.
…absurdity is paradoxically the vehicle by which sociopolitical/cultural understanding crystallises most intensely.
Yet when Gulliver voyages to Laputa via a stone tower after being spared from execution, he discovers a country no less worse off than Balnibarbi. Laputa is depopulated save for the royal staff, whose Prince Munodi has actually been living in Monte Carlo for more than a decade and working as a porter; and the stagnating staff seems to be only concerned with keeping up appearances for the folks down at Balnibarbi. As such, the question of which country controls whom and why becomes all the more muddled, and both countries end up looking sad and silly in their preoccupations with what the other does. All the while, Juráček via Gulliver never passes judgment on either country or anyone. But through close observation of their absurd separate and connected goings-on, an acerbic sociopolitical critique gradually emerges. In this way, absurdity is paradoxically the vehicle by which sociopolitical/cultural understanding crystallises most intensely.
Gulliver’s outside, nonjudgmental perspective thus posits him as a passive presence more than a rebellious one vis-à-vis what he sees in Balnibarbi and Laputa. In this way, Gulliver is not too distant from the protagonist of Josef Kilián, Herold. Herold’s confusion over the disappeared cat rental agency only increases as he delves deeper into state bureaucracy; but he does not react with tantrums and protests over his confusion or the illogic of state protocol. Significantly, Herold the character makes two appearances in Hangman, with his rented cat still in place inside his briefcase. As with Herold, Gulliver’s passiveness is also largely due to his constant physical disorientation—though what separates Gulliver from Herold is precisely the former’s outsider status, no matter how ensnared he becomes in some of Balnibarbi’s machinations. Making tangible this disorientation are the film’s abrupt and unfinished shots, cutting into one another halfway through as if in a constant rush, and its frequent disregard of spatial continuity from one shot to another. Hangman’s most compelling characteristic is born precisely from the film’s editing style and Gulliver’s passiveness: like the floating rock island of Laputa, the film intermittently hovers above interpretation; but unlike Laputa itself and its remaining inhabitants, the film is unafraid to delay meaning simply for the sake of maintaining the façade of narrative. In sense, then, Hangman is about puncturing narrative, the connection of things, and their stitched meaning(s), be it in terms of cinema or politics, but without doing away with it altogether.
Though “Normalisation” began in 1968, it affected the film industry beginning only in 1969 and 1970. One of the consequences was the prompt banning of films considered politically suspect, among which was A Case For A Rookie Hangman. According to film scholar Jonathan L. Own, Juráček’s initial idea for Hangman was to present “a society developing backwards, ‘advancing’ into barbarism.” This idea is still palpable in finished version of Hangman. Certainly the politics of such an idea in the context of post-invasion Czechoslovakia is audacious, however much Juráček claims the film’s apoliticalness. The deteriorating worlds of Laputa and Balnibarbi—mired in suspicion, surveillance, interrogation, and delusion as they are—also invite reference to “Normalisation.”
An uncompromising and hypnotic swansong from Juráček.
Related Posts
Review: Iron Man 3 (2012)
Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)
Review: Love Is All You Need (2012)
Review: Generation Um… (2012)
Review: Iron Man 3 (2013)
