Section: POLSKIE HORYZONTY: The Female Gaze

Konec srpna v Hotelu Ozon

The End of August at the Hotel Ozone

Jan Schmidt
Czechoslovakia, 1966, 78 Min

A group of young women, led by an elderly woman born before catastrophe struck, meander across a devastated landscape, already long on the hunt for companions in order to ensure the survival of mankind. A sparsely staged post-apocalyptic world, partly shot at a location with a difficult past of its own to tell.

Národní filmový archiv

The countdown, which begins in Russian before switching to other languages, makes it easy to guess what has occurred: human civilisation has collapsed. An old woman reflects on the past, using a tree stump as a calendar. The young women she leads never had a chance to encounter the civilised world, and thus they have no concept of morals or conscience. Nevertheless they take it upon themselves to rescue mankind.

Visions of the end of days weren't exactly commonplace in socialist-era Czechoslovak cinema, not even in the liberal sixties, making this film from Jan Schmidt all the more remarkable. In fact the tale has a further unnerving element, to the extent that certain scenes were shot in the abandoned town of Doupov (or Duppau in German); abandoned that is after the forced expulsion of the local German population. Turned into an army training area in 1955, the town was later completely destroyed. An inscription on the wall of a local abandoned church reads “It has come to pass”, a comment that could equally be applied to this film's post-apocalyptic setting. CF

Filmformat
35 mm | s/w / b/w
Drehbuch
Pavel Juráček
Kamera
Jiří Macák
Ton
František Fabián
Schnitt
Miroslav Hájek
Ausstattung
Oldrich Bosák
Musik
Jan Klusák
Darsteller
Ondrej Jariabek, Beta Poničanová, Magda Seidlerová, Hana Vítková, Vanda Kalinová, Natálie Maslovová, Irena Lžičařová, Jitka Hořejší, Alena Lippertová, Vladimír Hlavatý, Olga Scheinpflugová, Jana Nováková
Produzent
Jaromír Kallista, Erik Hubáček
Produktion
Český armádní film
Kontakt
Národní filmový archiv
Katerina Fojtova
Malešická 14
130 00 Prague
Czech Republic
Tel.: +420.778.48.78 56
katerina.fojtova@nfa.cz
www.nfa.cz

Jan Schmidt - born 1934 in Prague, ČSSR. After breaking off his medical studies at Charles University in Plzeň Schmidy enrolled at FAMU in Prague in 1957. In 1963 he founded the Studio Ypsilon in Liberec. He numbers amongst the lesser-known directors of the Czechoslovak New Wave movement, somewhat in the shadows of the likes of Jiří Menzel and Miloš Forman.

Movies
CESTA DOMŮ (1960, short)
POSTAVA K PODPÍRÁNÍ (1963, short)
KOLONIE LANFIERI (1969)
LUK KRÁLOVNY DOROTKY (1970)
VOLÁNÍ RODU (1977)
PODFUK (1985)
VRACENKY (1990)