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Film Description
A feverish study in paranoia in which Ludvik, a senior Communist official, arrives home from a government function to find his house unlocked and bugged. With the awareness of their every word being listened to, through the night his relationship with his wife descends into fearful recriminations. The film functions as a daring allegory of the relationship between an oppressive political regime and its citizens. Needless to say, it was banned immediately upon completion.
Made in 1970 but banned before release and unshown until a retrospective in 1989 when it was screened in a locked cinema, it’s surprising that The Ear was made at all,... more >
Made in 1970 but banned before release and unshown until a retrospective in 1989 when it was screened in a locked cinema, it’s surprising that The Ear was made at all, being a study of one of the primary mechanisms of totalitarian state control – fear. The film takes place through the course of a night. Comrade Deputy Minister Ludvik and his wife have spent the evening at a reception for their President. They return how to find the house unlocked, the electricity off and the telephone dead. As Ludvik replays the events of the evening, the offhand remarks and the absence of his Minister come to take on a more sinister aspect and he fears that his own position is compromised. With important documents missing and their future uncertain, the couple’s relationship descends into bitchy sniping and taunts which take on a rougher edge when the alcohol starts to kick in. That it is also their tenth wedding anniversary doesn’t help matters. Then there is the constant fear that their conversations are being picked up by ‘The Ear’ in their bugged apartment. Anna’s initial defiance of this aspect, joking that ‘the comrades don’t sleep, they are listening’ is all too prescient.
The film is marked by a confidence of visual conception that stems from Kachyna’s early training as a cinematographer. The darkness of the house and its scenes lit by matches and candlelight contrasts with the high-contrast brightness of Ludvik’s recollections of the evening in which addresses straight to camera put the viewer in his position, making scenes where people excuse themselves when they realise Ludvik hasn’t heard the news of the Minister’s removal all the more direct and worrying.
Many commentators have remarked on the obvious marital similarities to the couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. However, Ludvik’s flashbacks also call to mind another film in that they play out like a nightmarish take on Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad, where a decadent psychology of incertitude has been substituted by an all-too-real fear of imminent, undefined, state-sanctioned punishment. The edgy, jittery quality of the sound design with its unresolved themes also adds markedly to a nervy atmosphere that belies the smiles of the evening.
The Ear was one of the thirteen films Karel Kachyna made with Jan Prochazka, one-time member of the Communist Party Central Committee and who also had the ear of the President. It was this standing of Prochazka that enabled the film to be completed under the guise of ‘officially-approved criticism’. Revealing the inner workings of the State and its secret service to the public was a step too far though and a cinema release was out of the question.
For the most part, viewers of this film will have had no experience of totalitarianism. It’s a necessary reminder of just how easily the mechanism of a state can turn against its own citizens and how the lives of even loyal citizens can be thoroughly invaded, making fear and paranoia the dominant factors in daily life and activities. By the end of the film, Ludvik and Anna, for all their differences, at least have each other to face an uncertain future together. They also have a child who, improbably, sleeps through the whole night of shouting, revelry and recriminations. He is a new Czechoslovakia, untainted by suspicion and fear, waiting for his moment to wake.
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