The Shop on Main Street
Czechoslovakia, 1964 -- 128 mins.
Directed by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos
Script by Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos, and Ladislav Grosman
| Cast: | Tono Brtko | Jozef Króner |
| Mrs. Lautmann | Ida Kaminská | |
| Evelina, Tono's wife | Hana Slivková | |
| Marcus, the brother-in-law | Frantisek Zvarík | |
| Mr. Kuchar | Martin Hollý |
Directors Kadár and Klos worked as a team from 1952 until 1969, when Kadár went into exile following the crushing of the "Prague Spring" and the suppression of Czech film's "New Wave". Klos (born in Brno in 1910) was writing film scripts as early as the 1930's; after the war he was among those who planned the nationalization of the Czechoslovak film industry, and he taught at Prague's famous film school FAMU, where Kadár studied. Kadár (born in Budapest in 1918) first worked in Slovakia but moved to Prague around 1950; he was Jewish, but not self-consciously so (he says) at the time he made The Shop on Main Street. The two men's joint films got them in trouble several times in the 1950's. This is their best-known film, not least because it won an Academy Award, the first ever for a Czech film.
The setting:
The story, from a novel by Ladislav Grosman, takes place in 1942 in an unnamed Slovakian town. (The language of the film is therefore Slovak, a distinct language from Czech.) In March 1939 Slovakia had become a separate state when Nazi Germany took over the remnants of the Czech lands (six months after the Munich Agreement that stripped the German-inhabited lands off Czechoslovakia). Nominally independent, Slovakia was in fact a puppet state that eagerly did Germany's bidding and imitated the Nazi system in numerous ways, instituting the uniformed "Hlinka Guard" (in imitation of the SA) and the practice of "Aryan controllers" who in effect took over Jewish-owned small businesses. The governing Slovak People's Party (strongly Catholic, and led during the war by Monsignor Jozef Tiso) had long been outspokenly anti-Semitic, and it was the first of Nazi Germany's East European satellites to offer up its Jews for the Nazi program of "resettlement" in Poland.To look for:
1) Music is important in this film. There isn't much, but when it comes, it has something to say.
2) There is one big, unmistakable symbol in the film, the tower. Try to figure it out.
3) The cinematography is by no means as simple as the story. Watch for artful camera angles and camera movements, shots in mirrors and through glass, and so on. What do they contribute to the film?