All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci) - DVD

Vojtěch Jasný was born in the Moravian town of Kelč in 1925, studied at FAMU (the Prague Film School) and graduated in 1951. Together with a fellow student, Karel Kachyňa, he co-directed a notable graduation film Till the Clouds Roll By (Není stále zamračeno, 1950). The critic Antonín Liehm admired it for its attention to non-studio reality, a potential breakthrough which came somewhat out of its time “when it couldn’t establish an epoch”. Between 1950 and 1954, Jasný and Kachyňa continued their collaboration on a sequence of eight documentaries before making the feature It Will All be Over Tonight (Dnes večer všechno skončí, 1955). Both had studied cinematography as well as direction and this no doubt accounts for the strong visual emphasis in their work.

Jasný’s first solo feature September Nights (Zářijové noci, 1956), was adapted from Pavel Kohout’s play satirising the army, and won the Czechoslovak critics award. In 1958, he further developed the collaboration with the cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera that was to extend through most of his Czech career. Their film Desire (Touha, 1958), according to the Czech critic Jan Žalman, marked a renaissance of form and a return to the kind of poetic cinema that had characterised Czech film in the 1930s. All My Good Countrymen (Všichni dobří rodáci , 1968) drew on his mother’s memories of village life. The script was first written in 1956 but it was finally passed for production in 1967 (although Jasný also remarked that it was given the personal go-ahead by Alexander Dubček, the Party leader during the Prague Spring reforms of 1968). Jasný remarked “With Countrymen, I showed real life from 1945 to 1968. It showed real people in real truth. It was the first film in which I could say the truth”. It had a successful release in Czechoslovak cinemas in 1968 and won the prize for Best Direction at the Cannes Festival in 1969. Set principally between May 1945 and the summer of 1957 (with an epilogue during the Prague Spring in 1968), it focuses on the experiences of a single Moravian village. It starts with the sense of exultation at the end of the war through to the Communist takeover in 1948, the process of collectivisation, the tragic consequences of Stalinism, and the final message of hope offered by the Prague Spring. The policies of the 1950s are shown to have led not only to mismanagement, but to careerism and vindictiveness within a community that previously enjoyed its own kind of balance. This is undoubtedly an idealised vision but clearly represents Jasný’s conception of what might have been. While telling the truth about the system ensured that the film was banned, its interest today depends much more on its aesthetic vision, to which cinematographer Jaroslav Kučera and composer Svatopluk Havelka make important contributions. While Kučera's cinematography allows some scope for colour experimentation, the overall emphasisis on the photography of the natural landscape - the patterns of ploughed fields, drifting snow, birds perched on plant stems. It’s an elegy to the destruction of a lost way of life. All My Good Countrymen is, above all else, a deeply personal film – Jasný recalls his dog coming to meet him after his father’s arrest by the Gestapo during the war; František is based on the character of his best friend who was arrested during the 1950s. He has also spoken of his interest in ‘realistic fantasy’, the parallel worlds of humans and animals, the function of time and dream. It was scarcely surprising that All My Good Countrymen fell foul of the authorities following the Soviet invasion and suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968. Over 100 feature films from the 1960s found themselves on a 1973 blacklist with four of them to be ‘banned forever’. All My Good Countrymen was one of them. The other three were Miloš Forman’s The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko, 1967), Jan Němec’s The Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1965) and Evald Schorm’s End of a Priest (Farářův konec, 1968).