Lecture & Film: KOPYTEM SEM, KOPYTEM TAM

KOPYTEM SEM, KOPYTEM TAM  Tainted Horseplay

CSSR 1988, Director: Vera Chytilová
Cast: Tomás Hanák, Milan Steindler, Tereza Kucerová. 137 mins. 35mm. Original language version with German subtitles

Lecture & Film: Věra Chytilová
Between Surrealism and Subversion: The Films of Věra Chytilová

With her surrealist-inspired, anarchic works, Věra Chytilová gave cinema a new face in the 1960s. The Lecture & Film series “Between Surrealism and Subversion: The Films of Věra Chytilová” presents the director’s most important works with introductions by experts who situate Chytilová in the context of the current film studies debate.

The year is 1988, the agonizing final phase of real socialism in the West Bohemian province. A neurotic camera follows the work and leisure of three men in the sparse snow of the spa town of Karlovy Vary. It begs the question: what else can you do in this corrupt jungle but make out with each other? Chytilová delivers a satire of her 1980s society that imperceptibly transforms from a comedy into a tragedy. Does the catastrophe bring about a cleansing or does it remain a whine and a shudder?
The tragicomedy revolves around a group of thirty-somethings who move from party to party and various sexual adventures until one of the friends is diagnosed HIV positive. Vera Chytilová was one of the first directors in Eastern Europe to make a film about the then taboo subject of AIDS. The end of the film is said to have hit like a bomb in unsuspecting Czechoslovakia at the time, which sent this film to both the Moscow Film Festival and the Oscar competition.

Natascha Drubek-Meyer teaches film studies and general and comparative literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She is editor-in-chief of the open-access journal Apparatus (www.apparatusjournal.net), which is dedicated to film and media cultures in Central and Eastern Europe.