One of the most original of Czech film directors and the holder of the Golden Camera from the Berlin Biennale has been shooting for half-a-century. The Collage will offer an uninterrupted two-and-a-half-hours of projection showing in chronological order a film extract from each of his seven films.

A dog's funeral becomes part of a chain of absurd events including a tomato ketchup battle, a reconstruction of the battle of Austerlitz and a motorbike show. Its common denominator is the commercial interest of sponsors and big buisness, the ambivalent winners of privatization and participants of numerous coruption affairs.…

The most characteristic theme of the film, whose actors are symbolically “imprisoned” in the space of Prague’s National Theatre, is that of subversive battles launched against any sort of establishment (in politics, scholarship, and culture) and the rules or “laws” that frequently work against them—rules that, of course, also…

In this film, Vachek works partially from concepts in his unrealized screenplay of the 1970s (bringing them into the present), and also adopts the first part of his title from historian Bohuslav Balbín’s (1621–1688) overview of figures in Czech culture. The other parts of the title refer to Komenský…

Jiří Krejčík reflects on the dusk of civilization, Ivan Jirous steals professor Žilka’s soup, Petr Cibulka reveals the communist conspiracy and Karel Vachek demonstrates the reconstruction of the battle of Sudoměř. And Tomáš Vorel sleeps…

Several years have passed since November 1989. Czechos­lovakia has split apart, and in the Czech…

Following his promising debut in the 1960s with the documentaries Moravian Hellas (1963) and Elective Affinities (1968), director Karel Vachek spent the majority of the 1970s and 1980s as a political persona non grata, at times working various blue-collar jobs and at times in emigration, without completing a single film…

Between 1963 – 1968 Vachek attempted in vain to complete a feature film with Oldřich
Nový in the leading role – his great ambition. The helter-skelter events of 1968 (Prague Spring) forged a role for him instead of recording the events surrounding the election of the new President of Czechoslovakia.…

At the beginning of the 1960's the „problematic“ budding student of film direction at FAMU (Prague Film Academy) was temporarily expelled from the school as a result of disagreements with certain tutors, and spent a year as a manual worker in Gottwaldov (today's Zlín). At that time he began to…

The only surviving film made by Karel Vachek as a student represents for us today an interesting testimony of his creative development. Nevertheless, we can find in his work treatments which later became typical in his films – above all, the use of the spoken word when Vachek adapted…