SEPTEMBER 27, 30
OCTOBER 18, 25
NOVEMBER 1, 8

"The first-ever North American retrospective for this unclassifiable Czech filmmaker...If you haven’t figured it out by now, these movies resist easy descriptive grasp — their restlessness, sprawl and genre-defying sense of play must be experienced, heavy a time investment as that might seem. They are not, however, ‘heavy’ films, but frequently delightful ones." — Dennis Harvey, SF360

Little known outside his home country, the poet provocateur and philosopher Karel Vachek (b. 1940) is one of the Czech cinema’s most original talents. His recent works, so-called "film-novels," are antic, obsessive, kaleidoscopic epics of impressive cinematic skill and enormous scope and ambition. Mixing improvisation, staged sequences, cinéma vérité, public performance and first-person confrontation, the engaging Vachek plunges into arguments about — and humorously exposes the absurdity of — recent Czech social, political and cultural history. His earliest works, including Moravian Hellas (1963), his controversial graduation film, and Elective Affinities (1968), one of Eastern Europe’s first cinéma vérité films, marked him as an enfant terrible of the Czech New Wave and an important new documentary artist. In between these two creative periods was a decades-long exile from filmmaking: after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia ended the liberalizations of the Prague Spring, Vachek, like many of his fellows, was effectively banned from directing. Vachek worked at manual trades for years, and immigrated to the West for a time in the late 1970s. The Velvet Revolution saw his return to cinema. A teacher at FAMU, the famed Czech film school, since 1994, and head of its documentary department since 2002, Vachek has now gained a growing reputation as one of the Czech Republic’s greatest living directors.

"Like Michael Moore, whose desire for provocation he shares, or Ross McElwee, like Vachek at times a picaresque figure, Vachek is a central presence in all of his films, in deep conversation (often argument) with his subjects." — Alice Lovejoy

The last four films in this retrospective make-up Vachek's The Little Capitalist Tetralogy: Beer with President Havel. Conversations with a bear. A communist collaborator in bed. Karel Vachek returned to filmmaking after 30 years of censorship with a series of works that reveal the proximity between the serious and absurd sides of life. Camped somewhere on the border of the two is Vachek, belligerent, comic and shrewd. The four "film-novels" of the Little Capitalist Tetralogy are chronicles of a society in transition from communism to consumerism, filmed in Vachek’s wide-angle, lucid style.  Inspired by the scope and wit of Dante, Vachek’s masterpiece sets out to create a Divine Comedy for the dispossessed, the absurd and the foolish. Along the way, he records the birth of a nation. - Alice Lovejoy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: This retrospective retrospective was curated by Irena Kovarova and Alice Lovejoy and produced by Radim Procházka Productions with the support of the Czech Republic State Fund for Support and Development of Cinematography.  Pacific Cinémathèque is grateful to Irena Kovarova for her assistance in making this Vancouver presentation possible.

Portions of the introduction and film notes adapted from texts by Alice Lovejoy.