The Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film 1960–1989

March 26–May 15, 2020

A series of stark, scathing, and playful films from the former socialist republics of Eastern Europe, where absurdity was a fact of life under authoritarian rule—and a source of cinematic creativity.

Read full description

I Hate Mondays
The Witness
The Barnabas Kos Case
March, March! Tra-Ta-Ta!
What Would Happen If . . .

Upcoming
Films
Upcoming
Events
Selected
Objects
Past
Films
Past
Events

Past Films

CANCELED: The Asthenic Syndrome
- Friday, May 15 7 PM
Kira Muratova
USSR [Ukraine], 1989
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

Legendary director Kira Muratova’s demented chronicle of the absurdities and insults of post-glasnost Soviet life takes its title and cues from a psychological condition that alternates between maniacal aggression and apathetic inaction. “A movie that breaks all the rules” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

Introduction by Stanislav Menzelevskyi
CANCELED: What Would Happen If . . . ?
- Sunday, May 10 7 PM
Gerhard Klingenberg
East Germany, 1960
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more

Released the year before the building of the Berlin Wall, this farce imagines the relocation of a village from East to West Germany. With Vlastimil Venclík’s Czech short The Uninvited Guest, on a couple confronting—then growing accustomed to—an intruder.
CANCELED: Four White Shirts
- Thursday, April 30 7 PM
Rolands Kalniņš
USSR [Latvia], 1967
Digital Restoration

An idealistic singer in a fledgling Latvian rock band fights censorship and indifference in this inventive musical, which earned comparisons to the French New Wave. With Gyula Gazdag’s The Selection, a Hungarian take on the intersection of socialism and rock ’n’ roll.
CANCELED: Case for a Rookie Hangman
- Saturday, April 25 5 PM
Pavel Juráček
Czechoslovakia [Czech Republic], 1969
Digital Restoration

Pavel Juráček imaginatively adapted part of Gulliver’s Travels into a sci-fi journey through socialist Czechoslovakia. The film’s allusions to uncomfortable truths caused it to be “banned forever.”
CANCELED: The Barnabáš Kos Case
- Sunday, April 5 4:30 PM
Peter Solan
Czechoslovakia [Slovakia], 1964
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

A humble triangle player in a city orchestra unexpectedly winds up its party director and, engorged with a taste of power, soon becomes a tyrant in Slovak director Peter Solan’s droll send-up of authority and hypocrisy.

Introduction by Gabriel M. Paletz
CANCELED: I Hate Mondays
- Saturday, April 4 5 PM
Tadeusz Chmielewski
Poland, 1971
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration
Film to Table dinner follows

This lighthearted comedy turns a dysfunctional Warsaw into a slapstick playground worthy of Jacques Tati, balancing criticism and lyricism in its portrait of the forgotten details of daily life in a socialist state.

Introduction by Gabriel M. Paletz
CANCELED: The Reenactment
- Thursday, April 2 7 PM
Lucian Pintilie
Romania, 1968
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
BAMPFA Student Committee Pick!

The police force two friends to reenact a drunken crime on screen—with awkward results—in Lucian Pintilie’s masterful satire, voted best Romanian film of all time in a poll of Romanian critics.

Introduction by Gabriel M. Paletz
CANCELED: March, March! Tra-Ta-Ta!
- Saturday, March 28 5 PM
Raimondas Vabalas
USSR [Lithuania], 1965
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

A Baltic Duck Soup about the dispute between two nations over a desert borderland, this ambitious, playful film makes colorful fun of fascists and imperialists, patriotism and dogmatism, in a burst of creative satire made the same year as Dr. Strangelove.
CANCELED: The Witness
- Thursday, March 26 7 PM
Péter Bacsó
Hungary, 1969
All film screenings and public programs at BAMPFA have been temporarily canceled. Learn more
Digital Restoration

A bumbling protagonist fails at a series of assignments before finally showing defiance in this recently restored Hungarian classic, whose acerbic humor and political critique made it renowned in the Soviet bloc. “As broadly entertaining as it is bold” (New York Times).

The Cinema of the Absurd: Eastern European Film 1960–1989

March 26–May 15, 2020

Absurdity was a fact of life in the socialist republics of Eastern Europe, from the end of World War II until—for most of these countries—the revolutions that began to transform the region in 1989. Marking the thirtieth anniversary of the liberation of the former “people’s republics” from their repressive regimes, this program features works from Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, the former East Germany, and both parts of the former Czechoslovakia, most in West Coast premieres of digital restorations from their national film institutions. As the series shows, the shared sensibility of the absurd unites these diverse nations and their films.

The Eastern European sense of the absurd brewed over centuries when peoples of the region could not determine their fates. In the twentieth century, the absurd overflowed in the gaps between the ideals and realities of their socialist states, between the happiness citizens were supposed to enjoy and the material hardships they faced. It was a response to the failures of public services, the pretenses of public life, the sense of physical and spiritual confinement, the ruination of the landscape, the fantasy of escape, and the search for daily dignity within regimes that refused to admit any flaw. More than in Western Europe, the absurd in the East was a personal, concrete, everyday experience.

These films evoke the liberties that Eastern Europeans only intermittently enjoyed in the twentieth century and that again feel fragile in the twenty-first. Glossy or stark, scathing and playful, these movies express the ludicrousness of authoritarian rule through creative varieties of absurdity.

— Gabriel M. Paletz, Guest Curator

Less

Film Series Sponsors: Jim and Ruth Reynolds

We are grateful to the following archives and institutions for making this series possible: Národní Filmový Archiv (Czech Republic), Studio KADR and Filmoteka Narodowa (Poland), Magyar Nemzeti Filmarchívum (Hungary), Slovenský Filmový Ústav (Slovakia), Centrul Naţional al Cinematografiei and Arhiva Nationala de Filme (Romania), The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Center (Ukraine), Lietuvos Kino Centras (Lithuania), DEFA Film Library and Deutsche Kinemathek (Germany), and Nacionālais Kino centrs and AKKA/LAA (Latvia).