All the bright young men and women;: A personal history of the Czech cinema

by Josef Škvorecký

English (translation)

Genres: Film, Czech Literature

280 pages, Loose Leaf

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Josef Škvorecký, CM was a Czech writer and publisher who spent much of his life in Canada. Škvorecký was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1980. He and his wife were long-time supporters of Czech dissident writers before the fall of communism in that country. By turns humorous, wise, eloquent and humanistic, Škvorecký's fiction deals with several themes: the horrors of totalitarianism and repression, the expatriate experience, and the miracle of jazz.

Reviews

[Glyven]

While this is essentially a personal memoir focused on Škvorecký's encounters with the filmmakers of the Czech New Wave, it extends beyond that description to serve as an informative historical overview of Czech film, up until the Prague Spring was crushed by the Warsaw Pact in 1968. It's also a relentless and often amusingly sarcastic diatribe against the bureaucrats who frequently squelched creative expression in the name of so-called "socialist realism."

[Patrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

All the Bright Young Men and Women is, as the subtitle states, a personal history of Czech cinema, particularly of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. In addition to being a novelist, Skvorecky was a screenwriter, many of whose scripts never made it past the censors (including one he worked on for a few years with Milos Forman), in part because of the notoriety attached to his first published novel, The Cowards, which was immediately banned by the authorities. The author provides a good background for Czech cinema from the late 19th century up through the 1950s, but where this book really shines are Skvorecky's stories of working and socializing with the great filmmakers of the 1960s. The miracle of this time is that, with little regard to commercial prospects, writers and directors were provided with the means to make movies that attempted to show the truth about people and society, and that they were able to produce so much in the brief opening between the relaxation of censorship in the early 60s and its reimposition in 1969-70, following the Soviet invasion of 1968. This is no dispassionate account, and in addition to providing his own critical assessments of the films discussed, Skvorecky provides many examples (often in lengthy footnotes) about the idiocy, cowardice, and pure meanness of the Communists towards these filmmakers and their works.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of Czechoslovakian Cinema told by a master storyteller who was there, in the theaters, on the sets, with the writers, directors, and actors. Skvorecky has numerous asides and tales about all of them and the changing political milieu that affected them all.