The Village Revolt

It is really interesting to compare how people react to similarly tuned comedies from the First Republic. While similarly meaningless festivities (often even more trivial in nature) seem to be acceptable to our people there, "The Village Revolt" irritates with its completely toothless ideological realities. At the same time, the toothlessness is just one of the reasons why I liked this agrarian party so much. Josef Mach's film goes far beyond contemporary aesthetics and norms, and although it is appropriately joyful, and although it contains all the stereotypes of the time, it works with an extremely fresh and rustic element of feminine emancipation. For this reason, it does not avoid the eroticism of the time (the outline of the breast on the canvas is very bold from the perspective of the time period, as well as the ubiquitous obvious ambiguities). The conflict between old-fashioned men and modern women guarantees plenty of fun gags, which are either intentionally or unintentionally ridiculous. František Filipovský played an excellent caricature of a village redneck, while his drunken call for "pork goose" captures the trivial, yet humorous poetics of the film. This is only completed by the incredibly naive work of the cameraman, who at certain moments tries to experimentally tilt his camera, perhaps following the example of expressionist cinematography. At that moment, The Village Revolt is funnier than most films. Not to mention the fact that with all its stereotypes the emancipatory component of this comedy is very current, the technical design is cutely bad = I had a ton of fun for 105 minutes. This rarely happens to me when watching First Republic comedies. And the ideological messages in this film are suppressed by the year 1949, so you can easily watch it without gnashing your teeth. (13/11/2006)