Co delat?
I have seen Co delat during my stay in Prague last semester (2005/06). It's Karel Vachek's (one of the veterans of the Czech New Wave) third feature-length film, one of which was made in 1968, after which he didn't produce something comparable until 1992 (Novy Hyperion). I remember getting a headache from having to switch from subtitles to the screen all the time, because the film was so hard to follow. This is some kind of a quasi-documentary, hard to compare with the work of other directors (Alexander Kluge, perhaps Herbert Achternbusch would be the only ones that come to my mind). At times the film is visually quite impressive, but if you don't speak Czech or know at least something of Czech history and politics in the early 90s, it borders on being completely unintelligible (which I believe must be part of its strategy). Anyway, this sure could be interesting to grasp something of the mood in the Czech Republic some years after the Velvet Revolution, a time marked by the struggle between different traditions and attempts to form a new society out of the ruins of Communism.
Cast
