CaSFFA

ALT Stars of Prague’s avant-garde Liberated Theatre, Jiří Voskovec and Jan Werich wrote this Depression-era slapstick unionist comedy with director Frič and legendary screenwriter Václav Wasserman. The revered “V+W” double-act play, respectively, a workers’ rep who goes off-script live-to-air and a bankrupted factory owner who team up to make something of their and others’ lives. Often compared to René Clair’s À nous la liberté and Chaplin’s City Lights, it also parodies Eisenstein’s The General Line and was banned during the Nazi occupation. 35mm print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

ALT This madcap, sci-fi time-travel film set in the 1990s details a plot by neo-Nazis to journey back in time to furnish Hitler with the hydrogen bomb and change the course of history. Polák (Ikarie XB 1) fuses the delightfully silly with the ingenious, the fantastical trappings of science fiction with the physical reality of then present-day Prague, all accompanied by a wonderfully lively score by composer Karel Svoboda. As characters move dizzyingly back and forth across time, encountering earlier and later versions of themselves, the paradoxes pile up and history stands on a precipice. Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

ALT This bizarre, psychedelic take on the body-swap comedy sees Iva Janžurová (best known for her lead role in Juraj Herz’s Morgiana) play an assassin with the cloned body of a famous actress and the transplanted mind of a male serial killer. Despite a clear anti-monarchist stance in its parody of inter-kingdom diplomatic conflict, Vorlíček’s film’s surreal logic defies easy explanation, with its mise en scène built around the overwhelming pop-art styled sets by production designer Oldřich Bosák (Closely Watched Trains and The Cassandra Cat). Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

ALT Filmed in just a few weeks at Prague’s Barrandov Studios, this adaptation of the 1934 novel by Fan Vavřincová is considered one of Frič’s best movies and amongst the most popular Czech comedies of all time. Structured around a farcical screwball plot involving the purloining of a neighbour’s instructions for rose growing, this co-stars one of the most famous actors in Czech cinema, Oldřich Nový, as well as emerging star Nataša Gollová in one of her first headlining roles. Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

ALT This helter-skelter silent screwball comedy classic is a breathless mélange of assumed and mistaken identities, chase sequences, doppelgängers and fantasised murders. Anny Ondra (the original “Hitchcock blonde” in 1929’s Blackmail) puts in a hilarious turn as Fifi, one of the great screen flappers, opposite gangly Czech comic genius Vlasta Burian, who appears in two roles. With cinematography by the great Otto Heller (The Crimson Pirate), this 2014 restoration features a score perfectly attuned to the mayhem by contemporary Czech silent film music specialists, Neuvěřitelno. Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.

ALT Happy End (1967) -Digital print courtesy of the National Film Archive in Prague.