A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, July 13, 2026

Prefab Story (Vera Chytilová, 1980)


Cast: Lukás Bech, Antonín Vanha, Eva Kacírková, Oldrich Navrátil, Jirí Kodet, Bronislav Poloczek, Daniela Srajerová, Milan Klásek, Ladislav Potmesil, Hana Hejduková, Petr Kratochvíl. Screenplay: Vera Chytilová, Eva Kacírová. Cinematography: Jaromir Sofr. Production design: Ales Voleman. Film editing: Jirí Brozek. Music: Jirí Sust. 

Vera Chytilová's Prefab Story (aka Panelstory or Birth of a Community) is so brilliantly made that I'm saddened that it isn't better known. The setting is a huge modern housing complex in Prague, where the apartments are being filled with eager new tenants even while construction is going on. Construction equipment plows and scrapes through the muddy site as the residents try to go about their daily business, with great crane-hoisted slabs of walls sailing high above them. Life goes on in often intersecting narratives, which Chytilová links into continuity with two characters who perambulate through the complex: a small boy (Lukás Bech) and an old man (Antonin Vanha). The boy thinks it's all a grand adventure, while the old man is the only one who seems to care about his fellow inhabitants. It's a superb mix of documentary-style footage and multiple, a humanistic satire edited with wit and given bite by a spiky, often atonal score.  

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