Jan Němec
January Němec ( born July 12, 1936 in Prague) is a Czech filmmaker. For his documentary material derived substantial portions of known about the suppression of the Prague Spring TV images. The film historian Peter Hames Němec described as the " enfant terrible of the Czech nouvelle vague".
Life
Němec studied at the Czech film school FAMU in Prague. In the emergent around Jan Prochazka "New Wave" of the 1960s Němec played an important role.
In his thesis film at the University Němec edited a short story by Arnost Lustig at the concentration camp experience ( sousta ). Němec filmed afterwards with Démanty noci (German: Nightly Diamond, 1964) a further substance of Funny. The movie shows the fate of two boys who escape from a train to a concentration camp, and falls formally for his experimental techniques dramatic subjectivity ( flashbacks, hallucinations, etc).
O slavnosti a HOSTECH (German: About the festival and its guests, 1966) shows a picnic, which slips under the influence of a charismatic sadist in totalitarian structures, conformism and hunt for outsiders. The fact that the central figure was shown in a kind of Lenin mask, led to the ban of the film. Also, most of the actors of the dissident scene belonged to.
Mučedníci lásky (1966 ) was for an apolitical love story. With Mother and Son ( 1967) Němec won a prize at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
Oratorio for Prague became the documentary of the crushing of the Prague Spring. Němec handed the artwork personally to the then Austrian television director Helmut Zilk and the ORF spread it worldwide. Philip Kaufman built the original material of Němec in his film The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988 ).
After 1968 Němec left Czechoslovakia, lived first in the Federal Republic of Germany, then in the U.S. and appeared as a pioneer of the video. After 1989 he returned to his home and shooting movies, such as night conversations with the mother ( noční hovory s matkou, 2000), a film that won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno International Film Festival.