Pearls of the Deep
Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Jiří Menzel, Jaromil Jireš · 1966
Pearls of the Deep (1966) is a Czechoslovak anthology film comprising five short segments, each directed by a different filmmaker — Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec, Jiří Menzel, Jaromil Jireš and Evald Schorm — and all adapted from short stories by Bohumil Hrabal. Shot in naturalistic style by Jaroslav Kučera, with sparse scores by Jan Klusák and Jiří Šust, the film resists thematic or tonal unity in favour of fidelity to Hrabal’s voice: his fascination with minor lives, unremarkable epiphanies, and the comic gravity of everyday speech. Though uneven in execution, its collective stance — against grand narrative, against didacticism, against the idea that meaning must be earned — makes it a defining work of the Czechoslovak New Wave.
