All posts by wckersten

Middle European 1970s surreal feature film

I saw this film around 1976, maybe a little later, on PBS (before they stopped showing art films) on a series they were running of European art films.  It was in gritty black and white, shot on real locations, was Polish or Czech or some similar middle European production, and was a fantastic surreal film that started realistically but veered into surrealism and had a story about a young man going through various problems in his ordinary life as things became weird for him – the images I remember are suitcases with smoking holes, mannikins coming to life in a store window, a man on a scooter-like little tram going rapidly down a steep rail, a man conversing with several others as he smokes a cigar that explodes, boxes with holes in them.  There was a Kafkaesque quality to it, and the hero was trying to have a relationship with a young woman he met on a trolley but was thwarted in that.