LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Karel Kachyna: Ears
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Czechoslovakian writer/director Karel Kachyna died at age 79. Mr. Kachyna was part of the Czech New Wave, though he wasn’t as well known as fellow directors Milos Forman and Jiri Menzel. This may be due to the fact that his films were banned by the Soviets for nearly 20 years. His movie "The Ear" was nominated for the Golden Palm at Cannes in 1970. The film was banned and didn’t receive a public release until 1990! Mr. Kachyna wrote over 40 films and directed over 60.
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Shot as the period of “Normalization” began its repressive stranglehold on Czech film production, Karel Kachyna's daring political noir-drama The Ear was withheld from circulation immediately upon completion. A complex and multifaceted marital relationship is at the very center of The Ear’s concerns, which serves as an allegory for the complex relationship between a ruthless, oppressive political regime and its justifiably paranoid populace.
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All of this distinguishes both Kachyna and The Ear from the Czech New Wave (which Kachyna was not a part of, coming from the previous generation who began making films and documentaries in the early 1950s). Many of the most famous films of the New Wave were seriocomic, satirical works which mixed neo-realism, direct cinema and documentary techniques with comedy, absurdity and fantasy. The New Wave films, especially those by Forman and Menzel... tended to focus on individuals or professional groups rather more than familial relationships. The Ear, by contrast, presents a bleak domestic and political prognosis that is, broadly speaking, more in keeping with Polish or Hungarian cinema of the time than with the majority of its national brethren. For example, contrast Kachyna’s film with the representation of marital discord in, say, Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962); or with the portrait of the personal cost of political repression and the need for hope in adversity found in Károly Makk’s Love (1971), which similarly uses a fragmented narrative structure to elucidate a familial crises. Kachyna always considered himself first and foremost a visual stylist, but in The Ear his visual sensibilities are perfectly attuned to the profound weight of his narrative.
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In the early 1960s, Kachyna began a long and fruitful collaboration with the screenwriter Jan Prochazka. "Hope" (1963) started a so-called 'black' series of films which were openly critical of society. It is a story of two outcasts who officially did not exist under Communism — an alcoholic and a prostitute. This was followed by the ironically titled "Long Live The Republic" (1965). The events at the end of World War II — the arrival of the Russian army and the German expulsion — seen through the eyes of a sensitive and imaginative 12-year-old boy, demythologises the legend of victory, which led to the eventual banning of the film.
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When European audiences first saw veteran Czech director Karel Kachyna’s Ucho [The Ear] in 1990, all of twenty years had elapsed since the time of the film’s production. The major cinemas of the European Eastern Bloc in the Post-World War II era were all variously marked by the sweeping, turbulent political climates and developments that characterised the more than forty years of communist rule. The Ear... was made at a particularly fateful moment in the history of what was then Czechoslovakia. Kachyna and screenwriter Jan Procházka (an esteemed novelist and communist activist with whom the director collaborated on 13 films throughout the 1960s) began production on the film in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on 20 August 1968.
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The next Kachyna film, Santa Claus Is Coming To Town (1991), was financed by Czech television. It was a scenario found in Prochazka's legacy and Kachyna was supposed to have made it twenty years earlier. It is a warm story of an outsider who is as young as Olin (Long Live the Republic), rootless like Lucin (Hope), and it takes place in a hospital (like High Wall, Attention, Watch Out, the Rounds!, Counting Sheep, The Nurses, Funny Old Man, and many others) -- a hospital is always filled with a lot of outsiders. This particular outsider is of a fighting kind, a Robin Hood in pyjamas.
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