Closely Observed Bodies: Corporeality, Totalitarianism and Subversion in Jiří Menzel’s 1960s Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns the exploration of sexuality, the body and materiality in Czech New Wave filmmaker Jiří Menzel’s 1960s adaptations of the writings of Bohumil Hrabal. Particular attention is paid to two of Menzel’s most celebrated films, Ostře sledované vlaky [Closely Observed Trains, 1966] and Skřivánci na niti [Skylarks on a String, 1969]. I consider the subversive, political implications of these themes, especially in relation to Czechoslovak communist society. Sexuality and bodily need comprise for Menzel a means of evoking a resilient human ‘nature’, and represent a point of convergence between the expression of individual uniqueness and the recognition of human commonality. In this way the erotic or corporeal dimension offers resistance to the homogenizing and transformative ambitions of totalitarian power. This dimension is crucial both to Menzel’s construction of a kind of quotidian utopia, and to his repudiation of the tyrannical utopianism of Stalinism or Nazism. Menzel’s representation of sexuality is also considered in relation to his affirmation of wasteful or purposeless activity. Here I draw on Georges Bataille’s notion of the “unproductive expenditure” that defies the “rational” realm of instrumental actions. Ultimately I claim that while Menzel’s work is subversive in its opposition to Stalinism and other totalitarian regimes, it is conservative in its approach to sexual politics and falls short of Hrabal’s more challenging and complex vision.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".