How Art Lasts

Assessing a Czech New Wave masterwork, The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966)

The film discussed in this essay can be streamed here, on the recently restored Internet Archive (archive.org), the greatest website on the internet.

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It helps when first watching The Party and the Guests not to know a thing about its plot or the film’s fate, about Jan Němec, about FAMU (the Prague film school) and Czech New Wave cinema, about post-1948 Czechoslovak society and that state’s government and the Union of which it was part. It helps to be a real idiot, ignorant of these facts of history, and it helps to be a careful observer of people, alert to our nonverbal communicative powers, attentive to how the human character is underwritten by our moment-by-moment reactions to the behaviour of others.

What might have been a blunt political allegory is instead an exquisitely subtle study in conformity. And yet, these are personalities barely sketched, the actors handpicked from among the writers’ friends, their performances competent. And what do any of them suffer? Besides some jostling, no violence is committed, direct threats issued, or even voices raised. The villains only want everybody, no exceptions, to enjoy themselves. The ordinary people accept the pleasures and friendship offered. If there is something like a hero, he is heroic in his absence. “They kept pushing us about and laughing” is how the women describe their treatment under authoritarian rule.

The central characters’ torments pale in comparison to those of Kafka’s protagonists, but their predicament has rightly been called Kafkaesque. Out of nowhere, the seven men and women are detained on opaque charges. What the unnamed officials know about them, of what they are guilty, is impossible to guess. They share our confusion—though more confusing for us, still, are the men’s half allusions to prior relationships with what otherwise seem to be strangers. Much of their speech is disjointed. Some of what they say—calling themselves democrats, each repeating the same words after another—is blatantly nonsense. The crucial difference between this world and Kafka’s or Ionesco’s is that, while their speech may be meaningless at times, their lives are not. Their actions have meaning. They are possessed of free will.

A menacing hum, rising and falling in pitch, is sustained through much of The Party and the Guests, and this atmosphere compels the viewer to question whether our main characters are helpless. By the end, we know that all along they were not. One helps himself from within the system; five of them get along in it; the last gets the fuck out. Ester Krumbachová, who cowrote the screenplay with Němec, and on whose earlier short story their script was based, called the film “an attack on indifference.”

In writings about Jan Němec, his assertion that the thinking person living in an unfree society must “attack obstacles to freedom in every way at his disposal” appears time and again. A statement he made in the next moment is not widely quoted: “The immediate problems of society have finally been picked up by their rightful bearers: TV, radio, the press; and art is no longer obliged to do their job for them, to be covertly journalistic.” Němec was speaking in July 1968, one month before the Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the reformist Prague Spring movement and the Soviets reestablished control over Czechoslovakia. More than thirty years later, he would express a related sentiment about film’s affordances while lamenting the state of contemporary Czech cinema. “Film is in decay these days,” he said. The reason? “Everybody makes films that could be a serial, novel, picture documentary, radio play, or romance novel.”

The qualities that are unique to film, having no equivalent in other mediums—film’s formal and aesthetic means of storytelling—are Němec’s concern, as they are every great director’s. The works of his cited influences, Bresson and Resnais and Buñuel, Fellini and Bergman, “could be told as stories, but the cardinal experience is from the film itself.”

Just so, to reduce The Party and the Guests to its major and minor events, so as to detail how those events bear on the allegory beneath, as if the film were a narrative that by sheer accident is told through moving image and sound, rather than the form of, say, a novella, is to engage it in a way that is degrading to the art form. The full cinematic texture of The Party and the Guests, not the story’s political valence, is responsible for its significance.

Twenty or so wordless seconds midway through the film epitomize Němec’s method. The party’s host (the head of state) has arrived unexpectedly, welcomed the main characters, and reprimanded his adopted son (chief of the secret police) for harassing them in his “game” gone too far. Keen above all to show her good nature, the buxom wife compliments Rudolph’s acting, then turns to her husband for his agreement. The husband, his expression something beyond dispirited, turns and locks eyes with his wife. One by one, we see the other women and men of their group observe the husband. He breaks her gaze and moves his eyes to the ground, unanswering.

At this point in the story, the audience ought to feel relief, as the women picnickers do. With the host’s appearance, the threat posed by the thugs has passed. Instead, a new dynamic—more hidden, equally sinister—is being established. The threat of danger will no longer come from an outside, authoritarian figure but from their own, individual willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

The Party and the Guests is divided into three acts, each of which opens with a stylized group shot. Němec throughout insists that we see the main characters both as individuals and as a collective, a society of seven. Together they form a small mass of dispositions, each only glanced at, hard to distinguish on first viewing. Their fragmented and context-ambiguous dialogue swims about them. The camera captures the group as full figures. Conversely, shots of individual characters are always from the torso or shoulders up.

At the picnic, the opening scene, they laugh the laughs of adults. The film begins with these middle-class friends enjoying one another’s company, and wine, and a horrible aspic sponge cake. The women strip down at the nearby running brook to freshen themselves, like out of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Are they decadent? Probably they all work hard during the week. The men speak abstractly of a decision that needs making. The wives are blithely happy.

When the group turns our way to watch the wedding revelers coming over the hill, they appear to us as a tableau in the grass. Two scenes later, a moving camera stops to catch them in their next group shot, standing on a path in the forest and facing us again, but vulnerable now, and suspicious. They look on as a stranger from nowhere approaches one of them and takes him by the arm. Before even addressing Karel, Rudolph asserts an ironic dominance over him by synchronizing their steps so that they walk as a twosome, comrades through coercion. This moment will be echoed in the next act when Josef, who in a few words has acquiesced to the thugs on behalf of the group and then ingratiated himself, marches in unison with Rudolph around his imaginarily penned-in friends, no coercion necessary.

Act two opens with the picnickers shown together from behind in a clearing, loosely circled by Rudolph’s associates. We spy a man hiding among the trees. The thugs are relaxed and bored; this is ordinary business for them. The camera jumps between each of the picnickers as they strategize, their nervousness compounding. The next group shot occurs when they have been told to separate themselves. Acting as one, they pause, silently confer, and do not comply. Their unity will fracture soon after this. In a brief episode, Rudolph speaks of the birds and, with the sound of birdsong turned up artificially high, we see the listening faces of both the picnickers and the thugs. That he instructs them all with only a flicker of his eyes, and that the volume is so loud, makes the moment weirdly dictatorial. Culture determines nature, Rudolph’s conduct says. You will enjoy what you are told to. The composer Jan Klusák, who appears in Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1970) as another major freak, is unforgettable as Rudolph, his mocking smile and singsong voice implausibly threatening.

After the earlier tensions, act three opens like a painting, a scene of civility. The lake cuts the frame diagonally, long tables form a perspective line alongside a row of thin poplar trees that divide the banquet from the woods, and seven smartly dressed men and women who are not our picnickers stand in the foreground. The original group is already divided, though we don’t know it yet. The husband will soon make his break. During the meal, people are behaving themselves, the atmosphere is tense, the host is silently furious. His new right-hand man, Josef, who has already gone from civilian to collaborator, now advances to instigator by proposing that Rudolph pursue the missing husband. Josef’s public speech rouses the guests to collectively right this wrong. Out of brotherly love, the men rush up to go, and the rest follow.

The host would like to see a hunt—he never has before. The picnickers admire the skill of a German shepherd that will sniff out the husband. The wife expresses fear while looking coy, her words meaningless.

“People belong to people,” the host had said. The mind game of this statement is equivalent to Rudolph’s circle drawn in the gravel around the picnickers. When words and actions are not meaningless, their meanings are still entirely contingent on context—and how can we possibly, with confidence, know the minds of other people?

Earlier in the film, a ledger of the secret police turned into a party guest list. Now a wedding party has become a hunting group. These are the principal tonal shifts in The Party and the Guests, and form the basis of the plot, but throughout are extraneous details that psychologically disorient the audience, that set the uneasy mood: Laughing, a woman calls after her friends for a knife; a desk and chair are carried out of the woods; an authoritarian madly wags his fingers like a toddler; thugs rough up a man by tossing him in the air as though celebrating; sinister men hiding in the trees, their mouths covered with handkerchiefs, emerge and are welcomed as old friends; banqueters play musical chairs; the leader’s son muses lyrically about shooting himself in the head; a wife miraculously changes into her third outfit of the day, a hunting jacket, to join a search party for her husband; her friend questions her while he plays with a rifle, and their other friends stuff themselves with dessert and wine. Watching, it is impossible to settle on any feeling. The stakes are high and low. We doubt even our animal sense of dread. Whether or not this doubt makes us indifferent conformists is the film’s provocation.

The Party and the Guests is notorious for being one of four films “banned forever” in its home country, a fact that is cool if you’re a teenager, important if you’re interested in historical artefacts, and almost irrelevant if you care about film. As a classroom exercise, the reasons why it was prohibited by the government censors—twice, the first time at the ordering of Czechoslovak President Antonín Novotný—can be teased out: It was seen as unintelligible and therefore subversive. Ivan Vyskočil, who played the host, was thought to look like Lenin. In the role of the dissident, hunted-down husband was Czech director Evald Schorm, whose own film Courage for Every Day (1965) had been banned the year before.

To a viewer of The Party and the Guests, what do these bits of trivia matter? If there are people watching the film in two hundred years’ time—a faraway future in the history of cinema, a little while from now in the history of storytelling—they will be doing so because of how its story is told, because of the cardinal experience its audience endures and enjoys.