Courage for Every Day

Even people whose only contact with films takes place at the cinema know that every film must be shot. That just like music must be composed, a painting must be painted and a novel must be written, a film must be shot. But that's only half true. René Clair even claimed that a film was finished when it was written.

In my opinion, films build up like an avalanche. Someone has an initial idea or just a desire to make a film. And that someone initially rolls alone through the realms of film dramaturgy. And as they roll, they snowball more and more people, their collaborators, until the avalanche emerges, which then comes down at a roaring speed, and when it stops, the work (sometimes the work of destruction) is finished, the film is made. Describing the making of a film in a few paragraphs is just as difficult as describing a natural element. Let’s give it a shot, though.

Before the director Evald Schorm, hereafter referred to as Evald for brevity’s sake, finished his graduation film The Tourist (Turista) at Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU), the film which we had worked long and hard on together, František Daniel invited us to the Novotný-Kubala group. I remember that I was treated to coffee, which Evald refused because he does not like caffeine and nicotine. (Yet he always has pill bottles with all sorts of pills on hand, which he readily offers just like others do with cigarettes.) Ladislav Novotný was as matter-of-fact as ever; Bedřich Kubala was enthusiastic about Ewald and showed it in an explosive way. He suddenly stood up and said he believed us. Then we went out into the beautiful afternoon, breathing the spring in the air and knowing that we had been asked to write a script that Evald would shoot in this group.

Shortly afterwards, as part of the agreement with the group, I went to “collect material.” We did not know anything about the future film other than that it would be a film about the youth of a small but industrial town, from a background we both knew well. That was in the spring of 1961. I visited several schools and halls of residence, stayed at several factories, and was even provided with material by security personnel specializing in youth crime. I then described my findings in eighty densely typed pages.

At a machine in one of the factories, I saw a man whom I had known before as a prominent and popular youth official. I learned of his “end.” I was very intrigued by this fate, and when I described it to Ewald, we agreed that it was very revealing and that it could serve as an axis for our intention, which was beginning to gain shape: to make a film-narrative about the feeling of our generation, about the feeling of disillusionment and the search for courage.

It was only a year later, in the autumn of 1962, that the first attempt at this subject, characteristic of the chosen method, was completed. A cluttered mountain of primitively organized material, creative intent stifled by empiricism. A finger sore from the fountain pen, embarrassment in the group, helplessness. Evald found a way out. We have to use the process of elimination. Cuts were made until only the skeleton was left, and even on that substantial changes were made. To wrap the skeleton with meat required only our imagination; the collected material ended in the bottom drawer of the desk, completely forgotten.

We worked as follows: At eight-thirty in the morning Evald climbed to my apartment on the fifth floor with a heavy step. Usually, I was still in bed, and when I heard footsteps, it was like hearing a military “Stand up!”. From the apartment, we could see the courtyard surrounded by blocks of flats. We have often talked about people in the city living like rabbits in hutches. We agreed that life is very hard. And that the view from the window was grotesque and moving. Similar feelings formed the material for new and new attempts to cope with the topic. There were six manuscript attempts in total, each about a hundred pages. Each attempt was followed by a meeting with the dramaturgy team. One of the last ones lasted from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Meanwhile, another year passed. The script was approved in the autumn of 1963. The approval process was hard and laborious, which applied to all of our work.

Then another man, the cinematographer Jan Čuřík, “snowballed.” Reminding one of a firework going off, his temperament lifted the curse of restraint from our work and gave it the appearance of a thrilling, riveting play. He relieved us of the fatigue that was already setting in.

March 1964. We got some actors, and a crew of collaborators was formed. The avalanche began to grow dangerously large. I was quite happy, but Evald resorted to his pills more often and said: Maybe it's unmanageable. Astonished, people told him with that he was turning grey. Production manager Josef Ouzký stepped in, always smiling and bringing us a sense of security and stability. I was becoming more and more a mere spectator, a dead cell.

At the time of exterior filming in the town of Teplice, the actors became the busiest cells. I am tempted to write in detail about each of them, about Jana Brejchová, Jan Kačer, Jiřina Jirásková, Vlastimil Brodský, Josef Abrhám, Olga Scheinpflugová, Václav Trégl, but the number of words I have at my disposal forces me to limit myself and say only the most important things. We all felt we were in the same boat. As we searched together, over lunch or dinner, for what was behind this, many people assured me that we were so shaped by the content of the film, its rendition, which we all wanted to convey as our mission. Much had been done by Evald, who, as part of his intention, allowed each of the actors to express themselves. I remember how Evald, Jana Brejchová, Josef Abrhám and I were rewriting a long scene for these two actors in a hotel room in Teplice. They both came up with dialogues which they tried out on the spot. The next day, the scene was filmed. But the changes were also made directly “on the set.” That was some true creative atmosphere right there. The actors came up with new ideas not only for their characters, but also for the characters of their partners. The ideas were collectively assessed, refined, and implemented immediately. Everybody worked fast, often at a breakneck pace. We finished ahead of the deadline and the film was ready in early July.

The filming, the most important phase, was realized by three or four times more people than I could mention here. Films are like the great beet fairytale. No matter how strong the grandfather is, he would not be able to pull the beet out of the ground without the last mouse.

The avalanche stopped rolling; the film Courage for Every Day was finished. Many friendships were formed between people united by one goal, and one goal only. The prologues of the old plays invited the audience to applaud if they wished. We want to believe that through the film we will find friends among the audience as well.

Kino 19, 1964, no. 21, p. 6–7.

“And then we’ll lose our marbles. There’s a pub at the end of the world, but in the middle of this life. And we think it’s best to take a gun and shoot them all. Maybe we’re surrounded by traitors to the true, real, honest life.” (S. Machonin: Excerpt from the review of the first version of the literary script of the film Courage for Every Day)

On the occasion of the world première of the digitally restored film Courage for Every Day (Každý den odvahu, 1964) at this year’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, we commemorate Sergej Machonin. He first entered the Czechoslovak film scene in 1948 as one of the young film writers under the guidance of Jiří Hájek and Roman Hlaváč (having been under the influence of his experiences in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was still working in the spirit of active socialism typical for the era after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d’état).^[1] In the 1960s, he then made a significant contribution to the “ferment-like process in art and other intellectual disciplines” as a translator from several languages, editor, writer, critic and script editor.^[2] This contribution was based not only on his debates with the circle of people he considered kindred spirits, but above all on his work in Literární noviny (Literary Newspaper), both on his own texts and on the works of other authors he was able to concentrate around the then influential newspaper.

All the films Sergej Machonin worked on at the Barrandov Film Studio in the second half of the 1960s were made by the creative group Ladislav Novotný – Bedřich Kubala. Devoted to existential narratives at the time, the group had a permanent base of co-creators which included Antonín Máša, Evald Schorm, and Jan Čuřík.^[3] As the script-editing practice became much more individualised at the Barrandov Film Studio after 1962, the creative groups gained greater autonomy.^[4] Films were often results of an intense collective dialogue between artists and intellectuals who thought alike. Machonin’s name is specifically mentioned only in the later films of the creative group: as the script editor in Searching (Bloudění, 1965); as the co-writer in The Return of the Prodigal Son (Návrat ztraceného syna, 1966); and, again, as the script editor in Hotel for Strangers (Hotel pro cizince, 1966), The Girl with Three Camels (Dívka s třemi velbloudy, 1967), and I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen! (Zabil jsem Einsteina, pánové…, 1969). It is very likely, though, that he entered into a dialogue with the cast and crew of Courage for Every Day earlier. (At least in 1961 – as a theatre critic, Sergej Machonin regularly reviewed plays directed by Jan Kačer at the Petr Bezruč Theatre in Ostrava.^[5] Kačer later starred in Máša and Čuřík’s Searching and, together with Jana Brejchová, also in The Return of the Prodigal Son and Courage for Every Day.)

It is hard to guess to what extent Schorm’s 1964 film was inspired by Machonin’s reflections on the system. However, we do know that Machonin reviewed the first version of the literary script for Courage for Every Day. His text is very expressive, with some parts close to a manifesto; Máša’s script serves the reviewer as a base for his own reflections: For example, he did not refrain from criticizing “the distorted life we live that masquerades as socialism”. Machonin’s statements here are still made “from within the system of power, but with a declared will to break out of it.”^[6]

Klára Trsková

Notes:

^[1] With hindsight, Sergej Machonin assessed the era after the 1948 Czechoslovak coup d’état as follows: “Today – and in fact for almost half a century now – I feel my alternative of ‘building socialism,’ so mindlessly chosen after the war and the concentration camp, as a neuralgic point, a sore stretch, a several-year-long spasmodic zone of life, which, as everything else in my curriculum shows, has its justifications. But as it turned out, all these good reasons didn’t stand the test.” In: Sergej Machonin, Příběh se závorkami (Alternativy), Brno: Atlantis 1995, p. 186.

^[2] Ibid, p. 226.

^[3] The creative group Ladislav Novotný – Bedřich Kubala moved to the Barrandov Film Studio from Czechoslovak Army Film in 1956. According to their agreement with the Czechoslovak Army Film, they had to make an army-themed film once a year, but in the 1960s they abandoned the army themes and emerged in the New Wave subjects. In: Petr Szczepanik, Továrna Barrandov: Svět filmařů a politická moc, Praha: Národní filmový archiv 2016, p. 102.

^[4] Ibid, p. 286.

^[5] Tereza Pokorná, Barbora Topolová (eds.), Sergej Machonin – Šance divadla. Praha: Divadelní ústav 2006, p. 432–443.

^[6] Sergej Machonin, c. d., p. 229–230.