LE SOLEIL DANS LE FILET

By : Stefan Uher

With : Marian Bielik (Fajolo), Jana Belakova (Bela), Olga Salagova (Jana), Pavel Chrobak (Mechanizator Blazej), Adam Janco (Stohar Blazej)
Slovaquie, 1962, PAL, 4/3 - 94 min
zone 2, N&B,
8.00 €


English title: THE SUN IN A NET
Original title: SLNKO V SIETI

Directed by : Stefan Uher

With : Mari�n Bielik (Fajolo), Jana Bel�kov� (Bela), Olga Salagov� (Jana), Pavel Chrobak (Mechaniz�tor Blazej), Adam Janco (Stoh�r Blazej)
Slovaquia, 1962, PAL, 4/3 - 94 min
zone 2, Black and white

Original Slovak version with French subtitles

Masters restored, new subtitles and bookletwith analysis included.
Booklet: Stefan Uher interview by A. Liehm / booklet of the original slovak edition.

Oldrich "Fajolo" Fajt�k (Mari�n Bielik), a student who directs quasi-existentialist verbal abuse at his girlfriend Bela Bla�ejov� (Jana Bel�kov�), takes off to a formally-volunteer summer work camp at a farm, actually mandated by the authorities, which inspires both him and Bela to start a relationship with someone else. A parallel story peels layers off Bela's permanently tense home life marked by her blind mother's (Eli�ka Nos�ľov�) studied helplessness, and her father's (Andrej Vandl�k) revealed infidelity and past break with his father (Adam Jančo) who happens to live in the village where Fajolo is finding some consolation in the arms of a fellow student-volunteer Jana (Oľga �alagov�). As Fajolo begins to pry into Bela's grandfather's secrets, she, in turn, allows her new boyfriend Peťo (Ľubo Roman) to read and deride Fajolo's discursive and indirectly remorseful letters from the farm.

The solar eclipse barely discerned by the main characters through thick clouds at the beginning of the film is echoed by summer and fall images of the sun as they present themselves to all of them at various points in the film through a fisherman's net from his pontoon on the Danube beyond the city's suburbs, which Fajolo and Peťo have discovered independently and use as a swimming deck, a place to ponder life, or to try to seduce Bela. When, however, Bela brings her mother and brother Milo (Peter Lobotka) to the pontoon after a series of subdued interpersonal crises, the pontoon is on dry land because the water level has dropped, and the film ends with Bela and Milo lying to their mother about what they can see as they did about the visibility of the eclipse during the opening sequences.

THE SUN IN A NET is a 1963 film that became a key film in the development of Slovak and Czechoslovak cinema from the mandated Socialist-Realist filmmaking of the repressive 1950s towards the Czechoslovak/Czech New Wave and socially critical or experimental films of the 1960s marked by a gradual relaxation of communist control. Stefan Uher's cinematic idiom is as exquisite and deliberate as any of his European contemporaries, including Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman and Chris Marker.THE SUN IN A NET received multiple votes in a wide survey of Czech and Slovak film academics and critics in the late 1990s asking them for their lists of the 10 best films in the history of filmmaking in the former Czechoslovakia.

The early 1960s saw some relaxation of communism in Czechoslovakia. THE SUN IN A NET was the first film that took advantage of this new atmosphere. It brought a number of hitherto unacceptable social and political themes: distant - perhaps uncaring - parents, a philandering husband, teenagers changing partners, an attempt at suicide, a poorly run collectivized farm, the fact that the students disdained the summer "voluntary work" camps. None of these issues are resolved in a "positive" manner. The core storyline - the ups and downs in the relationship of two teenagers - the realism and novelty of its urban setting, and the hints at some social and political taboos were not lost on the audience, and cannot have been lost on the censors. THE SUN IN A NET pushed the envelope and showed artists, and the audience at large, what the authorities could now be pressed to permit.

Besides Stefan Uher's effort to get past the strict requirements of Socialist Realism, the director was inspired by some of the trends current in (Western) European cinema and culture in the 1950s. Among them were traces of Italian neorealism, the film's low-key style, a hint of fashionable existentialism in the dialogues, and attempts at cinéma-vérité amplified in the beer-drinking scenes in a tavern by the employment of a background soundtrack with taped unscripted conversations of real villagers. That also motivated Uher's choice of unconversant actors or non-actors.Some of the film's traits inspired students at the FAMU,who soon followed with a series of films known as the Czechoslovak/Czech New Wave.


Watch a video excerpt :
Le Soleil dans le filet
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