Cinema

(de voertaal van deze avond is Engels).

Jeffrey's Underground Cinema has been showing neglected and forgotten films for the last decade. This night:  

THE WHITE DOVE    1960
(Holubice)
Directed by František Vláčil
67 minutes
In Czech with English subtitles

Somewhere in the countryside of Belgium, a homing pigeon is sent off for the Baltic coast. But while en route, the bird hits a storm and gets lost, ending up flying over Czechoslovakia instead. In western Prague the dove is injured, and slowly brought back to life by an artist and a young boy in a wheelchair called Michal. This is a highly poetic film, creating a kind of sublime link between very different worlds (bird’s-eye views, a child’s gaze, the eye of an artist, the longing of a young girl on the Baltic coast).

Every scene of The White Dove is nailed with lyricism, and every image screams with beauty. As you watch each sequence unfold, there are always two parallel levels operating simultaneously… the symbolic and the narrative story. During the film you can freely drift between the two realms according to your desire. If you want, you can even leave the entire story behind and float with the imagery alone, since the entire movie is a visual rapture. It’s one of the few films I can think of that is so constantly breathtakingly beautiful it’s almost exhausting. It was shot at the end of the 1950s in Czechoslovakia, which makes it one of the founding inspirations of the Czech New Wave cinema which began several years later. The unwieldy music score is by Zdenek Liska (The Cremator), and the dazzling cinematography is by Jan Curík with Miroslav Ondrícek (If….) as his assistant.

This journey is the vision of Czech director František Vláčil (Marketa Lazarova), an artist little-known outside his home country, and this was his debut feature. The entire structure is so deeply surreal and poetic, but also humanist. It’s packed with spellbinding scenes, so rich and wonderfully crafted they make anything in movie theatres today seem dull and unimaginative. And once again a movie like this shows the power of physical human skills and artistry, and how valuable they are when compared to our modern world of push-button technology and easy solutions.

With a short introduction by Jeffrey Babcock

20:30 (doors and bar open at 20:00)
Free entrance / no reservations
We advise you to come early: max. 70 people /
no admittance after 20.30