Dis­cov­er one of the hid­den gems of the Czech New Wave

She is men­tioned in the same breath as Czech New Wave lumi­nar­ies like Věra Chytilová, Miloš For­man, Jiří Men­zel and Jan Němec, but Dra­homíra Vihanová nev­er quite achieved the same lev­el of recog­ni­tion as her illus­tri­ous con­tem­po­raries. Part of the rea­son is that her fea­ture debut was banned before release and she was sub­se­quent­ly denied the right to make films under a strict Com­mu­nist régime. She was lat­er per­mit­ted to make gov­ern­ment sanc­tioned doc­u­men­taries, but the sto­ry of her career remains a case of ​‘what if?’

Vihanová stud­ied at FAMU, the leg­endary Czech film school that churned out excit­ing auteurs through­out the ​’60s, many of its alum­ni find­ing inter­na­tion­al acclaim. Vihanová’s final year project, Fugue on the Black Keys, is a film brim­ming with verve and ener­gy, inspired by friend and col­lab­o­ra­tor Chytilová (par­tic­u­lar­ly her own grad­u­a­tion film, Ceil­ing) and the French New Wave. The cam­era free­wheels around Prague in a loose­ly con­struct­ed tale of a young African music stu­dent, Fati Farari (Julian Diaz).

More a per­son­al sto­ry than a polit­i­cal one, Vahinová’s moral con­science is clear in the film’s repeat­ed engage­ment with racial intol­er­ance and, as in Ceil­ing, com­men­tary on the male gaze via her protagonist’s wan­der­ing eye. She mix­es a voiceover of Fati’s inter­nal mono­logue with toe-tap­ping jazz and gui­tar music, itself punc­tu­at­ed with equal­ly high-tem­po clas­si­cal piano. Vihanová plays with visu­al effects like point-of-view shots, time manip­u­la­tion and oblique angles to cap­ture Fati’s inner psy­chol­o­gy, buf­fet­ed by lone­li­ness and iso­la­tion. The same cen­tral con­cept is the crux of her first fea­ture, Squan­dered Sun­day – this time with more point­ed polit­i­cal overtones.

Com­plet­ed in 1969, the film was not actu­al­ly released until 1994, five years after the Vel­vet Rev­o­lu­tion. Why it was banned is hard­ly a mys­tery. Anoth­er por­trait of a young man, it lays bare the frag­ile men­tal state of a sol­dier, list­less on a stag­nant Sun­day, his dis­af­fec­tion an easy alle­gor­i­cal asso­ci­a­tion for a coun­try recent­ly invad­ed and dis­con­tent beneath the Sovi­et jack­boot. Although not the most sub­ver­sive work, it embod­ied the things about the New Wave’s ver­nac­u­lar that were deemed too provoca­tive and, above all, anti-Socialist.

The alien­at­ed sol­dier, Arnost (Ivan Palúch) lurch­es from bore­dom to self-loathing through bouts of heavy drink­ing. Anx­i­ety and the threat of anni­hi­la­tion – both indi­vid­ual and nation­al – looms large like the shoot­ing tar­get hung above Arnost’s bed. His dis­sat­is­fac­tion man­i­fests as a series of inven­tive flash­backs that mir­ror and jux­ta­pose the nar­ra­tive of his Sun­day, includ­ing women he may have romanced and mis­treat­ed, and fan­tasies of a bet­ter life and bet­ter self. It’s arrest­ing view­ing – as potent a call­ing card as you’ll ever see – but it’s an unfor­tu­nate place to cut Vihanová’s sto­ry short.

Squan­dered Sun­day is a less exper­i­men­tal film than Chytilová’s first fea­ture, Some­thing Dif­fer­ent, but it is arguably the more coher­ent and engag­ing work. Chytilová fol­lowed her debut with the knock­out com­bi­na­tion of Daisies and Fruit of Par­adise before her own ban. Would Vihanová have fol­lowed a sim­i­lar tra­jec­to­ry had she not been restrict­ed to mak­ing doc­u­men­taries? It’s impos­si­ble to say, but her frus­tra­tion at being cre­ative­ly sti­fled is evi­dent in her work. ​“Make a good horse out of a bad one,” grum­bles Fran­tisek Kriz in her 1977 short, Last of the Clan, refer­ring to a fam­i­ly tra­di­tion of horse wran­gling. Although lit­er­al in the con­text, there’s an under­ly­ing truth to this state­ment about mak­ing the most of an unfor­tu­nate sit­u­a­tion that seems per­ti­nent giv­en the director’s own circumstances.

Her first colour film, Last of the Clan opens with a vibrant sequence in which a draught horse hauls logs down an embank­ment. Unlike typ­i­cal doc­u­men­tary films of the time it is filled with cut­aways and inserts which set the rhythm, while the pho­tog­ra­phy calls to mind the misty milieu of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalk­er. Even in films with clear state mes­sages, Vihanová found a way to flex her film­mak­ing mus­cles while silent­ly scream­ing about her own per­se­cu­tion – ​“When one does a job for 20 years,” a soot-cov­ered min­er tells her, ​“some­thing about it has to excite one.” The cre­ative process takes cen­tre stage in Ques­tions for Two Women, which finds poet­ry in the mun­dane and plays almost like a straight-laced doc­u­men­tary ver­sion of Chytilová’s Some­thing Different.

Vihanová was final­ly able to do some­thing dif­fer­ent in the ear­ly ​’90s when the yoke was cast off and she made The Fortress, adapt­ed from Alexan­dr Kliment’s short sto­ry of the same name. She con­sid­ered it her best film. Her final film, 2000’s The Pil­grim­age of Stu­dents Peter and Jacob, was poor­ly received but hard­ly dimin­ish­es the for­ti­tude with which Vihanová stuck it out for two decades, qui­et­ly express­ing her­self even as she was being denied the oppor­tu­ni­ty to. You can’t help but won­der… what if?

Dra­homíra Vihanová Doc­u­men­tary Pro­gramme runs at the Bar­bi­can on 4 June, with A Squan­dered Sun­day screen­ing on 2 June. For more info vis­it bar​bi​can​.org​.uk/film