“I gave up music and poetry, precisely because they were too close to my heart, and I will make films, because I’m not really interested in them. This way, it will be easier for me to put aside my personal preferences and just make true art that works,” Milan Kundera (1929-2023) outlined in an interview with AJ Liehm the considerations that accompanied his decision to apply. FAMU.

After finishing the Brno grammar school in 1948, he initially headed for the Faculty of Arts in Prague, but did not complete his studies in literature and aesthetics. Apparently due to expulsion from the Communist Party. Instead, he enrolled in Czech’s only film school, where he studied film directing and screenwriting.

The young poet remained at FAMU even after he graduated with a script for a feature film by Božena Horová and a diploma thesis entitled “Stalin in the fight against Trotskyism in Soviet literature and the situation on our artistic front”. He taught there about world literature until the late 1960s. Initially, he was an assistant, after defending a theoretical thesis on Vladislav Vančura and renewing his membership in the Communist Party, he became a technical assistant and, from 1964, finally a guide.

“Personalities are taught at FAMU, and contact with personalities enriches a person. For me, they are Milan Kundera, František Daniel, or MV Kratochvíl,” director and screenwriter Antonín Máša describes the inspiring academic environment. Other students of the time, Jiří Menzel, Miloš Forman or Karel Steigerwald, later recalled Kunder’s lectures with enthusiasm. He often lectured for several hours without a break in crowded halls. About the principles of building world famous short stories and novels or the relationship between literature and film. Informal discussions about taboo authors such as Franz Kafka often continue in Prague’s bars and cafes.

In the first half of the 1960s, Kundera began his career as a novelist with the first volume of the short story collection Směšné lásky (three volumes containing a total of ten successively published short stories). Individual short stories became the basis for several student films, full-length films, and television. In 1965, former student writer and then director Hynek Bočan became the writer of Kunder’s first film for cinema.

One of the youngest filmmakers of the new wave chose the final short story from the first volume of Funny Loves: No One Will Laugh for his feature-length debut. While reading the short story, he was struck by the fact “that some people, without having the moral right to do so, feel obliged to interfere in the private life of a person who deviates from his standard of living”. Such a character in the film is the untalented graphic artist Záturecký, who composed a piece about Mikoláš Alš. Now he is under pressure from AVU assistant Karel Klíma (played by Jan Kačer), from whom he wants to receive the lecturer’s positive opinion. But Klíma doesn’t dare tell him that the text is worthless.

As was Kundera’s custom, a superficial act of cowardice sets in motion a series of tragicomic events with irreversible consequences. The protagonist becomes increasingly entangled in lies and excuses, which negatively affects his position at the university and his relationship with his girlfriend Klára.

Neither the script nor the resulting film was considered by Kundera to be very successful. He resents the lack of a reflexive dimension and the shift in emphasis from the unequal relationship between Klíma and Klára to the hero’s clash with social norms. Also for that reason, he prefers to participate as a screenwriter in the next two adaptations. However, years later, he admitted that Nobody Will Laugh was perhaps the best adaptation of one of his works.

Bočan’s co-screenwriter for the film was Pavel Juráček, who frequently attended the legendary lectures. On Kunder’s recommendation, Juráček, one of the biggest talents of the new wave, accepted an offer to work as a dramaturg in Barrandov. The writer consistently supports the next generation of filmmakers with his texts and actions. When, for example, Aster Věra Chytilová was subjected to interpellation by an angry deputy of Pružinec in May 1967, it was Kundera who used the anarchist innuendo on IV. he defended the congress of the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union.

At the same time, in the spring of 1967, Kunder Žert’s first novel was published two years late. The book, which exposed the taboo subject of collective rural subversion and 1950s political repression, quickly disappeared from bookstore shelves. A year after publication, he won the Czechoslovak Writers’ Union prize, and the film was based on him.

Director Jaromil Jireš co-wrote the screenplay with Kundera while the novel’s script was under censorship. The literary basis of the upcoming film was also subject to censorship. It was only approved for production in 1968, after the previous control structure was abolished.

While the novel alternates between the four narrators, the plot-reduced film has only one central character, Ludvík Jahn (Josef Somr). During Stalinism, he sent his girlfriend a postcard on which he wrote, among other things: “Optimism is the opium of mankind!” A sound mind reeks of garbage. Long live Trotsky!” However, the recipient submitted the provocative writing to the faculty organization. As punishment, Jahn was expelled from the party, dismissed from the faculty and sent to the work department for enemies of the republic.

Years later, he remains a prisoner of his memories, of his old grievances and disappointments, which constantly penetrate the present through suggestive flashbacks. Ludvík encounters ancient situations and actors on the street, in his dreams, and in the mirror. Ludvík’s confrontation with the other characters reveals one of the central ideas of his timeless work, whose admirers include, for example, the famous film critic Jiří Cieslar – everyone has their own “truth”, which they opportunistically adapt to the situation.

Kundera was satisfied with films that emphasized the tragic level rather than the ironic of the original. According to him, Jireš cast great actors, created the atmosphere, gave the film rhythm, and masterfully shifted emotions. “I love everything the director has brought to my novel,” he judged the film version of Žertu.

The last to be filmed before the author’s emigration was his first short story I, the Sorrowful God, which he wrote in the late 1950s and allegedly found himself as a writer while writing it. Its director was Antonín Kachlík, who became known mainly for his pro-regime work from the normalization years. In the 1960s, however, he made several formally original films, though none of them achieved the same notoriety as his New Wave work.

The short story was made into a film already in 1967. It was retold by Jaroslav Horan with Miloš Kopecký in the title role, based on a script by Kundera’s wife, Věra, at the Brno television studio. The same actor played by Kachlík. He wrote the script with Kundera directly for Kopecky and Pavel Landovský, whose characters are given more space in the film than in the original.

Filming was to start right after the summer holidays in 1968. Therefore, in mid-August, Kachlík and his production manager went to Brno to arrange accommodation for the crew. Two days later, Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia. However, the invasion did not substantially slow production, and the film was able to hit theaters the following fall.

The protagonist and ironic narrator of the melancholic anecdote is the surviving alpha male Adolf. He hesitated a little. Above all, don’t mention your moral and intellectual excellence. Selfish bon vivant guides us through his relationship with a nineteen year old conservatory student with the help of a series of bon mots. However, the preoccupation was one-sided. So Adolf decided to punish the girl by hindering the uneducated Greek partisan Apostolka (Landovský).

Of all Kunderan’s adaptations, The Sorrowful God is the closest to a comedy. The ramifications of the central gag have no comparable serious ramifications here as they have in any of Kundera’s films. Thanks to Kopecky’s laid-back attitude, the film maintains a non-committal gaming atmosphere. Compared to the original, there is no contrast between the narrator’s light tone and the fact that the person humiliated others with his actions and ruined their lives.

After the August invasion, Kundera was at the top of the list of people whose artistic and public activities were undesirable because of his political views and activities from the Prague Spring period. In early 1970, along with the author’s other books, Romanový Žert was withdrawn from sale and from the library. Shortly thereafter, films by Jireš and Kachlík also disappeared.

After the normalization check, Kundera, like many other teachers and students, had to leave FAMU. According to the recollections of director Vlastimil Venclík, the writer’s work at the institution was even one of the main reasons why the school was considered to be completely closed.

Starting in 1975, Kunder’s new home became France, where he was able to continue his university activities. He first passed on his rich knowledge of film and literature to students at the University of Rennes, then in Paris.

Only one adaptation of any of Kunder’s texts was produced in a professional production. In the late 1980s, he granted American director Philip Kaufman permission to film The Unbearable Lightness of Being, originally offered to Miloš Forman.

Although Kaufman was relatively successful at finding eloquent visual equivalents to Kunder’s ideas and trying to maintain the essayist nature of the seemingly unfilmable novel, the co-produced love drama did not sit well with the writer. In fact, the feeling of losing control of his own work was so unbearable for him that it was from this experience that he decided to withdraw and guard his public image more carefully.

His original alignment confirmed what he had in mind in Eternity that appeared in parallel – precious visual art was replaced by empty “imagology” in an era of image predominance. He does not allow film transcriptions of his other works. There isn’t even an adaptation of The Farewell Waltz. It will be directed by Agnieszka Hollandová, another great film personality influenced by meeting the poet, novelist, pedagogue and screenwriter Milan Kundera.