A Report On The Party And The Guests

It seems that Czechoslovakia had their own cinematic New wave in the 60s, and two films from there made Renata Adler's Best of List for 1968 from her book A Year in the Dark. However, I was only able to rack down Jan Nemec's film A Report OnThe Party And The Guests from 1966 (the other film was The Fifth Horseman Is Fear directed by Zbynek Brynch). This lean film, 71 minutes, is a sort of parable: in that it has less to do with a particular authoritarian regime than it does with the tenuous nature of human freedom, and the potential of people to let themselves be lead to a prescribed system of thought, a certain pattern of behavior. Němec has said to have cited Kafka as a formative influence, and Party can be seen as a direct attempt to find a cinematic version of Kafka's literary style. The unexplained-imprisonment scenario calls to mind Kafka's classic The Trial, but it has been suggested that it is closer in spirit to one of Kafka’s Zurau Aphorisms: “a cage went in search of a bird.”