New York, April, April 11 (CTK) – A festival of Czechoslovak cinematography presenting 14 films from 1927 until 1943 will open at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York today, its organisers have announced on the museum’s website.
Only the Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s, which produced such great directors as the Oscar-winning Milos Forman, is widely known in the world, but before and even during World War II, “Czechoslovakia was home to a highly sophisticated and formally advanced film industry,” the event’s curators say.
This is why they decided to get the public acquainted with cult films from this era at the event entitled “Ecstasy and Irony: Czech Cinema, 1927-1943” that runs through April 23.
It offers, for instance, the avant-garde film Eroticon (1929) by Gustav Machaty as well as his “scandalous” Ecstasy (1932) with Hedy Lamarr, who later became a U.S. movie star.
The programme also includes Tonka of the Gallows (1930) by Karel Anton, a digitally restored copy of The White Disease (1937), an anti-Nazi allegory based on Karel Capek’s drama and directed by Hugo Haas who also appeared in the leading role, and films with the duo of comic actors and authors, Jiri Voskovec and Jan Werich, from the 1930, Your Money or Your Life (1932) and The World Belongs to Us (1937).
The newest film screened at the festival will be Happy Journey (1943) directed by Otakar Vavra.
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