Female Martyrdom and Sexual Sacrifice in Jiří Menzel’s 1966 Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal

By Micah Slater, Edited by Lucia Perfetti

In a review of the limited scholarship applied to the work of Czech New Wave director Jiří Menzel, several reading trends emerge: Western scholars are wooed by the Czech “miracle” of the 1960s, often attach his films to the work of philosopher Georges Bataille, and only briefly, if at all, address the symbology and characterization of the women in his films (Bates 37). Jonathan L. Owen, an author with a number of published works on Menzel’s films—specifically his adaptations from the works of Czech contemporary writer Bohumil Hrabal—speaks on Menzel’s portrayal of women most thoroughly, but still, merely to the pursuit of its limits: “Menzel’s representation of women does represent a flaw on the filmmaker’s own terms” (Owen 510). Some scholars ignore the gendered imbalance in his films entirely. Daniel Brennan asserts “all of Menzel’s characters have great depth” (212). Seeing that his work, alongside Owen’s, are the most frequently cited of the few English-language works on Menzel’s filmography, a gap in the scholarship becomes clear. 

In the interest of excoriating this deficit and examining the material causes and implications of this flaw in Menzel’s filmmaking, this paper will move between Owens’ limited readings of the sexual and body politics in Closely Observed Trains (1966) and Brennan’s assessment of sacrifice and martyrdom in the above and Mr. Balthazar’s Death (1966). Between the two films and scholars, a detailed analysis reveals the (mis)treatment of Menzel’s female characters to constitute a sexual sacrifice. In Closely Observed Trains and Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the self-effacement of Menzel’s female characters and their ostensibly willing submission to treatment as sex objects resemble the messianic sacrifice of national subjects in the Czech tradition, modeling for and compelling male characters to perpetuate the sex-death drive of Bataille’s theories of excess and consumption through forms of political martyrdom and individual dissidence. 

Owen’s analysis of the gendered politics in Closely Observed Trains resembles much of the scholarship on male directors with tendencies to underdevelop or disregard female characters. He notes the objectifying nature of the lens; that the women in his Hrabalian adaptations are often more attractive and less “base” than in the original writing; that their bodies are treated with a “formless materiality” that reduces them to sexual objects (Owens 510, Owens 97). Such are the immediately appreciable qualities of the women in the viewing of the film: of the six featured in Closely Observed Trains, one is a mother, one is a wife, three are erotic partners to male characters (erotic used here in the Bataillean regard for non-productive energy expenditure, as this is not exclusively sex), and one is a scarcely-appearing monument to scopophilia. Some are without explicit names. It is this set of patriarchal sexual norms from which Owen assumes Menzel was unable to sufficiently deviate. In Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the roles are reduced due in part to the length of the film, but nonetheless his women are remanded to sex or invalidity: an older woman drinks to the point of belligerence, well past being of any sexual value, while a younger sneaks off with her lover to withdraw from the spectacle of a motorcycle race. In extant writing, these portrayals are rightly cast as limiting and demeaning. However, in an analysis interested in the ecosystem and specific nature of these limits, Menzel’s meditation on sacrifice and martyrdom becomes relevant.

In Brennan’s article “Jiří Menzel’s Treatment of Sacrifice,” his working definition of sacrifice is the performance of “acts for political and social improvement at the expense of [a person’s] life” (208). He contextualizes these acts against the contradicting spheres of the political, cast as “distant [and] overbearing,” and the personal, the “mundane private relations” of intimate care relationships (Brennan 208). He argues that Menzel cautions against unconditional valorization of the sacrifice of dissidents and that, in order to perform martyrdom against the political, the interpersonal is inevitably disregarded. Brennan remains focused on the dialectics of these two spheres, viewing sex as the boast of the personal, and the political; an overhanging force to stymie the care relations fostered by the sexual-erotic experiences of his characters. 

While he does acknowledge that Menzel allows for play between the two, Brennan continually fails to recognize the established neglect of Menzel’s female characters, further remiss in that their narratives remarkably resemble his selfsame definition of sacrifice. (He uses as an example but doesn’t deign to name Zdenka (Jitka Zelenohorská), the station telegrapher and recipient of the infamous rubber stamps in Closely Watched Trains.) While there may be friction between this statement and the base survival of Menzel’s women through their narratives, it is not misplaced to note that they have endured a form of expense: in their mistreatment, they are, in a way, martyred to the erotic use-case of their bodies. Their sexual encounters are transformative points at which they engender political radicalization or personal growth in their male partners. Brennan also notes British Slavist Richard Pynsent’s diagnosis of a “martyr complex in historical Czech notions of national identity… a messianic complex around the blood sacrifice of various national Czech heroes,” an argument that would then certainly support Menzel’s implicit and, in Owen’s reading, unconscious treatment of his women as sacrificial bodies (Brennan 219). Menzel’s Bataillean synthesis of sex and death further aligns the sacrificial expense of a life with the sexual labor that then transforms his male characters. His ever-classic fixation on the French literal translation of orgasm to “little death” resounds (Owen 95).

At first reading, a connection between a purposeful but non-productive erotic expenditure and a Bataillean approach to the “truth of eroticism”—the squandering of excess energy—may seem contradictory (Owen 86). In fact, Bataille argues, this sense of waste is “integral to the pleasurable erotic experience” (Owen 84). If Menzel’s female characters are serving a sacrificial purpose, then the energy is not wasted, and therefore, the encounters are rendered as productive and by definition un-erotic. This goes so far as to be potentially rendered null in the face of  Menzel’s vocal resistance to the Soviet “productive man” (Owen 83). If his portrayed sexual encounters are motivating, and therefore in pursuit of a producible goal, what is between his erotically active cast and the gormless productivity of the characters in Socialist Realism films? Brennan offers an answer. As mentioned above, he argues that Menzel’s films of the 1960s regard sacrifice, even in its conventional and established definition, as waste itself, and inevitably results in the forgoing of the personal sphere—where Menzel places so much importance. Brennan asserts, regarding the death of  Closely Watched Trains protagonist Miloš Hrma (Václav Neckár), specifically as a martyr to the cause of the resistance, that “a young person, brimful of potential [...] has been fooled [...] into too lightly giving away their life” (213). The implication therein is that his successful erotic experience with female resistance fighter Viktoria Freie (Nada Urbánková), was a performed martyrdom that compelled him to his sacrifice; one that then ended his life. Therefore, a bifurcated picture of the nature of sacrifice emerges between Bataillean philosophy and Menzel’s own national complexes: female characters martyr themselves to unproductive sexual experience, a waste of their youthful virility and also a grand symbolic gesture in the Czechoslovakian national context. The gesture then motivates their male partners, as constituents of the same beliefs Menzel implicitly holds, to make their own wasteful sacrifices. Thus, Menzel splits the national martyr complex along gendered lines, restricting the sacrifices of Czech women to their erotic roles in men’s lives.

In Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the political—as in, the structural system in dialogue with the personal sphere—is reframed from the Nazi occupation to a motorbike race (Brennan 210). The spectacle of the race is presented as if akin to the political exploits of sacrifice or war—everyone is there for, and chattering relentlessly about, the past and potential gruesome deaths of the riders–reifying the national Czech sacrificial complex. He also refocuses his erotic waste on a couple, a pair of side characters who miss the race entirely to sneak off into the woods and expend Bataillean erotic energy. While they’re gone, the crowd gets what they came for: a rider, the eponymous Mr. Balthazar (uncredited), dies on the track [00:22:49]. This is tantamount to the form of martyrdom Miloš expresses in his own death, a public and pointless expenditure of (not as, but still) youth and virility. The political spectacle is missed by the lovers, who subsequently return to the track and see both the man motionless and the spectators leaving. They appear to be the only ones, other than the medical staff collecting his body, who hold any empathy for the rider and run to his body [00:23:24]. Here, Menzel presents a synthesis of feeling between the two forms of sacrifice. In the sexual sacrifice of his female partner, the young man is enabled of resistance in the form of empathy—a personal dissidence from his older, sexless, detached peers. In her sexual sacrifice, the young woman identifies with this dead rider, martyred to the national interest in the same way she has martyred herself to her partner’s sexual experience. Again, not a conventional death, but a marked rift between the politically living (the spectators) and the interpersonal dead (the couple and the rider). In a strange way, this death has liberated these young people from imbrication into the political quagmire of their elders. This evokes further considerations on Menzel’s—and other New Wave directors’—break with their predecessors, particularly in their ideological foundations. 

Other than fictionally condemning older generations for their fanatic indulgence in wanton political sacrifice, the Czech New Wave investment in the recontextualization of socialism from the state has been well-documented throughout the 1960s. As Robin Bates writes, “from 1962 to 1968, a basic goal of the Czech filmmakers was to liberate the ideals of socialism from the reified state in which those ideals had been trapped” (37). Closely Observed Trains casts further backwards than the context of 1950s Socialist Czechoslovakia, but between these two films, it’s evident both Hrabal and Menzel have little interest in literalism in terms of critiquing controlling political systems. Owens notes “one of Hrabal’s early ambitions was, it seems, to “colloquialize” surrealism” (496). Bates also includes a quote from critic Penelope Gilliat, observing that Czech contemporary audiences “seem to start from the assumption that everyone in the audience notices everything, that everyone is sick to death of public utterances that nibble around the edges of things as they are, and that there is not a man left in the country who could honestly be deceived” (39). Between the two, the clear inference is that both of these films inform audience readings not merely of the oppression of the Nazi period and the gladiatorial politics of the race, but the creative limitations of the generation and the decade of filmmakers preceding the New Wave. In both films, the older generations hold to the precepts of homogeneity and productive output, disapproving of frivolous sex and valorizing the death of martyrs as purposeful in the political context. 

A critical interrogation of the women of Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains and Mr. Balthazar’s Death can seem, at times, an exercise in making mountains out of molehills. They are hardly considered, barely named, and almost exclusively exist in the context of sex, eroticism, or male visual pleasure. Some scholarship has ignored this; others have commented on it in summary as a personal failure of Menzel’s to elide patriarchal sexual conservatism in his otherwise emancipatory impetus. Other more studied elements of his work, however, provide scaffolding to critically interrogate his female characters beyond their marginalization: between Owen’s readings of Bataille’s erotic waste and Brennan’s examinations of Menzel’s treatment of sacrifice, a refocused analysis of women and girls in his films is possible. Here, they are revealed to function as sexual sacrifices to their male partners, centered in the national preoccupation with martyrdom and messianic sacrifice as assessed by Pynsent. Menzel himself appears to hold a distinctly Bataillean perspective on the literal martyrdom of his male subjects, ending their lives in pointless politicized acts of spectacle and resistance, expending their youthful and virile energy in abject waste. Bataille’s assertion of erotic pleasure stemming from such waste allows this principle to backwards apply to sexual encounters between men and women, enforcing the wasteful erotic expenditure of Menzel’s female characters as another form of sacrifice. The deaths and sacrifices of these young people also serve as subtle critiques of the preceding generation of film-makers and -goers, whose capitulation to state depictions of socialism is compared to the spectatorial demand for meaningful death and (re-)productive sex. While Menzel tactfully criticizes both, his own sexual conservatism and disregard for his female host is equally illustrative: to Jiří Menzel, the martyrdom of eroticized women in the process of male maturation is implicit, informed by national preoccupations and social orders. It is through this initial self-effacing sacrifice that these men are then able to become wasted martyrs themselves, bodies on bodies in a heap at the end of the Czechoslovakian New Wave. 

Works Cited

Bates, Robin. "The Ideological Foundations of the Czech New Wave." Journal of the University Film Association, vol. 29, no. 3, 1977, pp. 37–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687379.

Brennan, Daniel. "Jiří Menzel’s Treatment of Sacrifice." Ethics & Bioethics (in Central Europe), vol. 9, no. 3, 2019, pp. 208–220, doi:10.2478/ebce-2019-0018.

"Closely Observed Trains.", directed by Jiří Menzel, Ústřední půjčovna filmů, 1966a.

"Mr. Balthazar's Death." directed by Jiří Menzel, 1966.

Owen, Jonathan L. "Closely Observed Bodies: Corporeality, Totalitarianism and Subversion in Jiří Menzel's 1960s Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal." Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes, vol. 51, no. 4, 2009, pp. 495–511. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40871461.

Owen, Jonathan L. "Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (1966); Hrabal and the Heterogeneous." Avant-Garde to New Wave. Berghahn Books, 2011. JSTOR,http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd7tp.8.