The Criterion Collection

Writer Bohumil Hrabal (left)—on whose stories the seminal Czech New Wave omnibus film Pearls of the Deep is based—had a beer with Czech Republic president Václav Havel and U.S. president Bill Clinton when Clinton visited Prague in 1994.

If you keep your eyes peeled, you can see Hrabal in the opening credit sequence of Pearls of the Deep (shown here), as well as in cameo appearances in each of the shorts it comprises.

Prague’s FAMU, where all the directors featured in Pearls of the Czech New Wave matriculated in the early sixties, shortly before they made the films collected in the set, is the fifth-oldest film school in the world (it was founded in 1946).

Věra Chytilová’s Daisies was banned from Czechoslovakian screens, partly on the grounds of food wastage “at a time when our farmers with great difficulties are trying to overcome the problems of our agricultural production,” as one National Assembly deputy put it.

President Antonín Novotný was apparently particularly incensed by Jan Němec’s surreal political fable A Report on the Party and Guests. It became one of four films to be “banned forever” by the government (the other three were Miloš Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball, Vojtěch Jasný’s All My Good Countrymen, and Evald Schorm’s The End of a Priest).

The enfant terrible of the directors in this set, Němec claimed that he always shot his subversive films (such as A Report on the Party and Guests, shown here) in a rush—in case the powers that be were coming to shut them down.

Director Philip Kaufman hired Němec as an adviser on his 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, on the basis of the Czech director’s experiences during and after the Prague Spring—he smuggled footage of the Soviet invasion to Austria, where it was broadcast on television. (Kundera also wrote The Joke, on which Jaromil Jireš’s film, included in this set, is based.)

The actor who plays the protagonist’s ballet-dancer friend and fellow patient in Evald Schorm’s Return of the Prodigal Son is the dancer and choreographer Jiří Kylián, who went on to become artistic director of the renowned Nederlands Dans Theater.

Director Jiří Menzel shows off his impressive acrobatic and tightrope-walking skills as the mysterious magician visiting the village in Capricious Summer.

When asked by the BFI what film he would most like to share with future generations, British realist director Ken Loach selected Menzel’s Closely Watched Trains.

Michael Koresky is staff writer at the Criterion Collection.