FILM EVENING FOR THE EXHIBITION DAS LEBEN IST EIN KAMPFSPIEL

Pink Apocalypse - Battlefield Movie

Why do hordes of zombies look so good? They've been through the battlefield experience of the Vietnam War. Why did František Vláčil film Martha Lazaro so perfectly? He was trained by Army film. Where did Count Orlok - Nosferatu come from? They hired a successful combat aviator to play him. What did Eisenstein do with Stalin's spoils of war? What films did the Czech legionnaires show in the cinema-train in Siberia? 

Army liaison František Jiroušek owned the first television license. The army and war have always had a central role in film, and although we now see cinema as a centre of entertainment, this entertainment was first redeemed by the blood of its creators. We'll talk about all this at the next film-adventure session at Cabinet T.

The fact that "art is a virus", as the slogan on Jan Vlček's painting announces, offers an excellent opportunity to recall major milestones in the development of world and domestic cinema. The battlefield at Cabinet T has undergone a major war experience in the past year. The figure of a soldier resembling Stalin, plunging out of the picture like a mighty Godzilla, this moment was captured by Ukrainian director Oleksandr Dovzhenko through the eyes of the vampire Nosferatu. Anyone who watches contemporary films might have watched with bated breath as films were made in the 1920s that make contemporary Hollywood smile in embarrassment. The vampire is essentially a secret weapon of war, grasped by filmmakers in a new and original way. The machinations of the machinations still click and whirr reliably in the 21st century. The Golem was last revived in Ukraine in 2017 by Israeli filmmakers the Paz brothers. Even before that, Germany built its monster army in a unique way. Caligari, Nosferatu, Mabuse and others have shown the world that the army is not only ready to attack on the classic battlefield. The biggest tank battle in the history of Czechoslovakian cinema armed the animated Crabs, a secret weapon from which there is no escape, but what happened on the Stolen Submarine in between? Führer Adolf offered the post of Reich director to monumental filmmaker and architect of the crowd Fritz Lang. Until he found a more selfless soul, the fragile Leni. Dozens of propaganda films from the Reich's history still lie dormant in the archives. In the same year that Werich's Golem was raging in the cinemas, the tireless tanker Josef Škvorecký was shaping his legendary Cowards in the army, to finally unleash the real Tank Battalion as an unguided missile of army satire...  Today, however, it's mostly dead Nazis and howling zombies. Werewolves, shake it off! Here comes Joseph Conrad and his Heart of Darkness through the eyes of a unique aesthetic horror and the smell of napalm in the morning: the monumental Apocalypse and the hallucinogenic epilepsy of The Third Part of the Night. 

Mgr. Martin Jiroušek, freelance editorial associate

cultural editor, film historian, critic, publicist, specialist in the poetics of horror in multimedia forms