Film historian
"Situation of the Street" - An experimental study about Czech life, focusing on Prague's National Street, its businesses and the varied people who frequent it.
In the 1950s, Ludvik Jahn was expelled from the Communist Party and the University by his fellow students, because of a politically incorrect note he sent to his girlfriend. Fifteen years later, he tries to get his revenge by seducing Helena, the wife of one of his accusers.
A picnic is rudely transformed into a lesson in political hierarchy when a handful of mysterious authority figures show up.
Screenplay
A student work by Jiří Menzel, filmed during his second year at the FAMU film school. Views of old Prague and its tenement buildings, symbolizing the obsolete past, alternate with shots of construction sites for new prefabricated apartment buildings. In spite of certain unavoidable propagandistic overtones added by the director, it is notable as the beginning of his search for a “dramaturgy of colors.”
