Europe Endless - Eastern Europe: The Ear (Dir Karel Kachyňa , 1h34m, 1969)
The year is 1990 and two films are up for the Palme D'Or. One is Interrogation (Przesłuchanie, dir. Ryszard Bugajski), shot in 1982 but, due to its themes of the political corruption of the Polish Communist Party, banned until the dying months of 1989. Its companion is The Ear ( Ucho , Dir. Karel Kachyňa), a similarly accusatory cinematic scalpel aimed at the governing Soviets, in which a married couple, Ludvík (Radoslav Brzobohatý) and Anna (Jiřina Bohdalová), return from a party to find their house ransacked, and must contend with surveillance as their marriage slowly disintegrates around them. The Ear had spent nearly two decades in storage, also banned by the Communists. Neither film will win, the Palme D'Or going to David Lynch's fine Wild At Heart , but with the fall of Communism and the USSR, so films criticising the fallen regime, and many banned by them, begin to gain release. The Czech Republic, in contrast to some of the nations we have v...
