Second Run DVD - The Czechoslovak New Wave: A Collection

Czechoslovakia, 1964 / 1965 / 1968
Length / Main features: 231 minutes
Length / Special features: 52 minutes
Sound: Original mono (restored)
Black & White
Original aspect ratios: 1.33:1 full frame & 1.66:1 / 16.9 anamorphic
Language: Czech
Subtitles: English On/Off
PAL DVD5 / DVD9
Region 0
RRP: £24.99

Release Date: 26th Nov 2012
Second Run DVD 074

This specially priced, Limited Edition 3-disc set comprises three extraordinary features from a golden age of Eastern European cinema which came to be known as the 'Czechoslovak New Wave'. This brief five-year period, from 1963 to 1968, produced an astonishing sequence of films that made a huge impact on world cinema. These three integral works of that most creative period were made in the most difficult of circumstances under the gaze of Government censors, yet achieved a miraculous and subversive marriage of content and form. Now, fifty years on, the films remain as remarkable as ever.

3-Disc Set comprises:
Diamonds of the Night / Démanty noci (Jan Němec,1964)
Němec's thrilling and startlingly original debut chronicles the tense and desperate journey of two teenage boys who are trying to stay alive after escaping from a German train bound for a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.
Intimate Lighting / Intimní osvětlení (Ivan Passer, 1965)
Regarded as one of the finest works of the Czechoslovak New Wave, this wonderfully subtle and affectionately comic study of provincial life becomes, in Passer’s masterful hands, a film of profound compassion and universal resonance. Stunningly shot by the great cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek.
The Cremator / Spalovač mrtvol (Juraj Herz, 1968)
This nightmarish comedy of terror about a professional cremator working in Nazi-occupied Prague and able to give vent to his increasingly deranged impulses. A uniquely dark and disturbing experience, heightened with a terrific score by the great Zdeněk Liška.

• Diamonds of the Night – a filmed appreciation by Peter Hames.

• Intimate Lighting – a filmed interview with director Ivan Passer.

• The Cremator – a filmed appreciation by the Quay Brothers.

• Presented in digital transfers with restored picture and sound.

• New and improved English subtitle translations.

• Booklets with each film, featuring essays by writer and film historian Michael Brooke, writer/broadcaster Phillip Bergson and writer/producer Daniel Bird.

Jan Němec's acclaimed film The Party and the Guests, voted by New York critics as one of the best films of the 1960s, and
Juraj Herz's delirious tale of terror Morgiana are also available on Second Run DVD.

Diamonds of the Night, Intimate Lighting and The Cremator are also available as individual releases.

"The Czech New Wave is perhaps one of the richest cinemas of the 20th century... A generation of Czech filmmakers gave us some of the most ingenious, original, innovative and most beautiful films in the entire history of cinema" MUBI

Diamonds of the Night:
"I watch this film and show it to my crew every time I start a new film" Agnieszka Holland,
Sight & Sound Director's Top 10 Greatest Films of All Time

"A love letter to cinema, describing all it can achieve and all it can inspire... unforgettable" CineOutsider

"A thrillingly original piece of cinema" FilmJournal.net

"A remarkable directorial debut... Němec's film is bleak, alternately realistic and hallucinatory" Chicago Reader

Intimate Lighting:
"(One) of the ten films which have most affected me"
Krzysztof Kieslowski

"One of the best European films of the 1960s" Roger Ebert

"One of those very special movies... it loses none of its charm, to age or to repeated viewing" New York Times

The Cremator:
"An enjoyably strange, undoubtedly original and occasionally terrifying film" Channel 4 Film Guide

"(The film has) a formally inventive nightmare texture which is still striking almost four decades later" Senses of Cinema