Jiri Menzel, Vera Chytilova, Milos Forman, Jaromil Jires — legendary names all, and all to greater or lesser extents exhumed and exhibited in recent years as exemplars of the New Wave of cinema that emerged, flourished, and foundered in Czechoslovakia during a peculiar interlude in the Cold War, a false dawn that left behind a real and lasting legacy.

The Czechoslovak 1960s, culminating in the much-eulogized Prague Spring of 1968, have long represented the road not taken by Eastern Bloc communism, a road whose signposts, accurately or not, pointed towards the promise of “socialism with a human face,” a new order in which economic equality and social solidarity would co-exist peaceably with personal freedoms. The Czech New Wave, particularly in literature and film, effloresced in concert with these developments for as long as they lasted, then partially reconstituted underground when the Soviet tanks rolled in.

The Harvard Film Archive has for the last week been screening a traveling retrospective of the complete output of filmmaker Jan Nemec, another fine, fiercely individual figure from the Czech New Wave, one who at the time received a great deal of attention, both from the international subculture of film-buffs and from the increasingly jittery authorities in Prague, who did one of his films the honor of decreeing it banned “forever”. But forever always ends, even if tomorrow never comes.

So, right, the film tonight is MARTYRS OF LOVE, a 1967 triptych of dream-tales dealing sometimes obliquely, sometimes obtusely with issues of, you guessed it, love and death. Rich in semi-coherent but never dull imagery and symbolism, Nemec’s final feature seems to draw more or less equally from the playful, semi-satirical fairy tales of Karel Capek and the modish zaniness of Chytilova’s DAISIES (1966), whose pair of prankster pixies put in cameos here.

If you’ve seen DAISIES, or maybe even VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (1970), you’re likely to find something akin to the spirit of those works here; and really, who can have too much of that in their lives?

Sad fact: I failed to find a trailer for MARTYRS OF LOVE to share with you. But cheer up, here’s a trailer for one of Nemec’s earlier films, DIAMONDS OF THE NIGHT (1964). It’s playing tonight, too, at 7pm:

4/25 – 8:30pm
71 minutes
$9 Regular Admission
$7 Non-Harvard Students, Harvard Faculty and Staff, and Senior Citizens

Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA
02138