ABSTRACT
From his cinema verite´ films of the 1960s through his ‘‘film novels’’ of the 1990s, maverick Czech filmmaker Karel Vachek has been known for his outspoken refusal to conform to aesthetic or political trends and for pioneering a new visual and narrative style for social documentary. A 1963 graduate of FAMU, the Film Faculty of the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Prague, Vachek has been called the enfant terrible of the Czechoslovak New Wave (Navra´til, 1992), a group of artists whose formal and conceptual experimentation gained international recognition in the 1960s. This reputation was born with his FAMU thesis film, Moravska´ Hellas/Moravian Hellas (1963). The thirty-three-minute documentary, filmed at the Stra´zˇnice folk festival, satirized communist perversion of folk culture, using a hybrid style that combined elements of cinema verite´ with staged interviews. The film was so controversial that after its release, Vachek was banned from filmmaking until 1968, when the reforms of Alexander Dubcek’s ‘‘socialism with a human face’’ eliminated censorship and lessened restrictions on personal and creative expression. That year, Vachek produced the cinema verite´ film Sprˇizˇneˇnı´ volbou/Elective Affinities (1968).
