Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Ten Best Films

In Projections 41/2, Krzysztof Kieslowski wrote: "I was recently asked by the editors of Sight & Sound to make a list of the ten films which have most affected me. Here is my list -- although the order is by no means significant (film number one could be number ten and vice versa): La Strada by Fellini; Kes by Ken Loach; Un Condamné à mort s'est echappé by Robert Bresson; The Pram by Widerberg; Intimate Lighting by Ivan Passer; The Sunday Musicians by Karabasz; Ivan's Childhood by Tarkovsky; Les Quatre cents coups by Truffaut; Citizen Kane by Orson Welles; The Kid by Chaplin."


New York Times by Roger Greenspun

IVAN PASSER made "Intimate Lighting" in 1965. It played at the 1966 New York Film Festival. I've seen it several times now, most recently in connection with its opening at the Fifth Avenue Cinema, and it loses none of its charm, to age or to repeated viewing. It is one of those very special movies that does not so much reveal new secrets each time you see it as confirm a justness and good humor that was never hidden.

Passer's anecdote (it doesn't amount to a story) concerns a cellist from Prague who, with his young mistress, visits a country town where he is to give a concert with the local orchestra. He spends a day and a night with an old school friend, a violinist who heads the town's music school and who has settled down with his mother and father, a plump wife, three kids, a car, and a garage full of chickens.
Nothing very significant happens. There is a family dinner, some amateur chamber music, and country funeral and a wake, a drunken late-night session involving the two friends and a family breakfast the next morning—with which the movie ends.

"Intimate Lighting" is constructed out of a series of minor embarrassments and low-keyed confrontations. Everything in the film's situation suggests incongruity and ironic distancing. But Passer has been at pains to keep all lines of communication open and never cruelly to play lifestyles off against one another. His warmth is neither sentimental nor condescending. And in all likelihood he has made a funnier movie from an awareness of imperfect reconciliations than he could have from an exploitation of disparities.

Understatement both in performance and technique, which has become a characteristic almost to cliché in many Czech movies, works perfectly in "Intimate Lighting." Passer, who has been known mostly as a scenarist to Milos Forman, is a perceptive director, and he has a fine cast to work with.
Because everybody except Vera Kresadlov (the mistress) has essentially a character part to play, it is difficult to single out anyone for praise. But I especially enjoyed Vlastimila Vlkova as the athletic grandmother, and Karel Uhlik as the town pharmacist whose violin technique is a struggle between musicianship and arthritis.

"I love this music. I love it passionately," says the pharmacist, who then takes up his violin and virtually saws apart a movement of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik." But he does love it, and the mess he makes of Mozart is the kind of testimony to love with which "Intimate Lighting" is filled. All the country people protest too much—their love of art, of family, of the lives they have to lead—but their protestations add up to a truth to which men agree and which it would be folly to disapprove.

For the final breakfast the grandmother has made an eggnog so thick and rich it won't pour out of a glass. She tells the family and guests that "with a little patience" they will have a treat. And so in the last scene they all stand, glasses raised, mouths open, utterly ridiculous but sublimely patient.


CineScene by Chris Dashiell

This wry comedy of provincial life was one of the signature works of the Czech "New Wave." It concerns the director of a small town music school named Bambas (Karel Blasek), who is visited by Peter, an old musician friend (Zdenek Bezusek) from Prague, and his pretty mistress (Vera Kresadlova). The once-ambitious Bambas is now disillusioned, and occupied in the day-to-day vexations of home life - with wife, children and aged parents to take care of. During Peter's visit they go to a funeral - for which Bambas and his father play the music. Later they put together an impromptu string quartet and play Mozart (poorly) while the puzzled young mistress gets an education in country life from Bambas' wife and mother.

Instead of creating drama or portraying unusual situations, Passer focuses on the humor of the ordinary and routine. The film shows true affection and understanding for all its characters, even (and especially) in the midst of petty bickering and resentments. This is one of those films where nothing much happens, but we can recognize the universal in the banal. The contrast between the modern girl and the old-fashioned women plays to the advantage of both, because they each recognize the similarities underneath. Passer focuses on one character, and then another, amusingly frustrating our narrative expectations.The picture is then capped by a masterful extended sequence in which Bambas and Peter get drunk together after everyone else has gone to sleep. The things they say reveal, without being too explicit, what has been lost over time, and some of what has been gained.

How do the dreams of artistic triumph in youth measure up against the reality of adult responsibilities? Music, and a relaxed comic style that is akin to the rhythms of music, provides the background to this question, against which the characters' fumblings towards truth and connection appear pleasantly ridiculous - but not, in the end, without some dignity. Beautifully shot and acted, Intimate Lighting is a very rare thing for a comedy - a work of acceptance.


Chicago Reader

Ivan Passer completed only one feature film before the changing political climate forced him out of Czechoslovakia, but this 1965 gem stands as one of the finest works of the short-lived Czech New Wave. A successful symphony musician comes to a small town to visit an old school friend, who has settled into teaching music at the local academy and playing an occasional funeral. Out of these drab elements, Passer has forged something funny and rare: a genuine comedy of melancholy--a gray comedy.


Time Out

The last Czech film by Milos Forman's co-writer Ivan Passer is a moving, sympathetically directed study of belonging, place and the pleasures of friendship. It follows the visit of musician Bezusek and his betrothed to old friends in a small country town. Wistful, gently comic and affecting. WH