All Seven Feature Films, Including the U.S. Premiere of Paper Heads
(1995), Introduced in Person by the Filmmaker
October 19–November 5, 1996
The remarkable Slovakian filmmaker Dusan Hanak will be the focus of a
seven-film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art from October 19 to
November 5. A complete presentation of Hanak's feature films, Dusan Hanak: A
Retrospective opens with the U.S. premiere of Paper Heads (1995).
Nine years in the making, this incisive look at postwar oppression in
Czechoslovakia will be introduced by the filmmaker in person at the
opening-night screening.
Hanak's best-known film in the United States is Pictures of the Old
World (1972), an extraordinary tapestry of life among villagers in the
Czech Republic's remote Tatra Mountains. This work was inspired by the
photography of Martin Martincek and by the films of animator Jan Svankmajer. It
was Hanak's second film, made directly after Diagnosis 322 (1969), his
formally adventurous and assured debut that shared the Grand Prize at the 1969
Mannheim Film Festival with Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool.
Paper Heads is Hanak's second documentary film, though documentary
impulses are evident throughout his work: in the sequences capturing gypsy
culture and music in the romantic comedy Rosy Dreams (1976); the
delineation of the daily humiliations and struggles of a love-starved married
woman in Quiet Joy (1985); and the trivia of socialist quotidian life in
Diagnosis 322. Using eyewitness accounts and stunning archival footage,
Paper Heads depicts and analyzes the practices of Communist ideology
from the end of the Second World War until the Velvet Revolution, in 1989. The
title refers to the giant expressionless puppets, papier-mâché
likenesses of former apparatchiks, that appear throughout the film.
Born in 1938 as part of a talented generation of filmmakers that includes
Jiri Menzel and Milosz Forman, Hanak has sometimes been spoken of as the black
sheep of the Czech film industry. His first feature, Diagnosis 322, was
banned, as was I Love, You Love (1980). Pictures of the Old World
was kept out of circulation by the Czech authorities for 16 years, because of
its portrayal of "a flawed society." When it was finally screened, in 1989, it
won numerous international awards, including the Los Angeles Critics' prize for
best documentary.
The suppression of Hanak's films is interesting since, with the exception
of Paper Heads, they are not overtly political; rather, they are close
observations of the habits, circumstances, and everyday lives of their
subjects. But it is precisely this candor and detail that so clearly reveal the
perversities and criminality of the regimes under which the characters labor.
Dusan Hanak: A Retrospective is organized by Jytte Jensen, Assistant
Curator, Department of Film and Video, with the cooperation of Pavel Cerny,
President, the Eastern European Film Office, Los Angeles, and Les Films de
l'Observatoire, Paris.
