Daleká cesta / Distant Journey / The Long Journey

Directed by Alfred Radok & Script & Mojmir Drvota & Story & Erik Kolár        

Vaclav Kutil    ....     associate production director
Milos Mastnik, Bohumil Smída    ....     production directors
Ferdinand Zelenka    ....     associate production director
 
Original Music by Jirí Sternwald
Otakar Parik    ....     musical director
Jirí Sternwald    ....     lyricist
         
Cinematography by Josef Strecha         
 
Film Editing by Jirina Lukesová
         
Art Direction by Frantisek Troster
Jan Pacak    ....     set designer
 
Costume Design by Jan Kropácek, Frantisek Mádl
    
Mojmir Drvota    ....     assistant director
 
Josef Vlcek    ....     sound
 
108 min.  Ceskoslovenský Státní Film/ Vyroba Skupina Rezac-Fabera-Smida  production
unit. Czechoslovakia: 1949.

With Blanka Waleská    ....     Dr. Hanna Kaufmann
Otomar Krejca    ....     Dr. Antonin Bures
Viktor Ocásek    ....     Engineer Kaufmann
Zdenka Baldová    ....     Mrs. Kaufmann
Jirí Spirit    ....     John [Honzik] Kaufmann
Eduard Kohout    ....     Prof. Reiter
Otýlie Benísková    ....     Prisoner
Bohumil Bezouska    ....     Young Jewish Man
Josef Chvalina    ....     Pepa Bures
Rudolf Deyl    ....     Jarda Noha
Jan Fischer    ....     Young Man
Zdenek Hodr    ....     Zdenek Klein
Karel Jelínek    ....     Brych
Marie Kautska    ....     Terezina's Friend
Eva Marie Kavanova    ....     Terezina
Josef Kollar    ....     Gestapo Agent 

Frantisek Kreuzmann    ....     Santrucek
Marta Májová    ....     Old Woman
Frantisek Marek        
J.O. Martin    ....     Karel Bures
Jaroslav Oliverius        
Jirí Plachý    ....     Abrahamovic
Sasa Rasilov    ....     Moseles
Ladislav Rychman        
Jaroslav Seník    ....     Beer
Sona Sulcova    ....     Ellen
Josef Toman    ....     Krejcik
Anna Vanková    ....     Margit
Frantisek Vnoucek    ....     Dr. Fried
Milka Balek-Brodská, Hermína Vojtová    ....     Wives
Prisoners Otýlie Benísková, Stefan Bulejko, Marie Buresová, Karel Effa, Oldrich Dedek, Antonín Jedlicka,
Anna Jirouskova-Tomanova, Vera Koktová, Milos Kopecký, Alexandra Myskova, Zdenka Procházková, Viola Zinková       

Alfréd Radok’s 1949 Daleká cesta / Distant Journey has finally reached us. It is considered a classic of the Czechoslovak cinema, which is remarkable as the film was virtually unseen for the first forty years of its existence. That story is revealing in itself. 

Between the end of World War Two and the establishment of Communist government was a brief  bright spot for Czechoslovak film. Their audiences had unrestricted exposure to foreign (that largely meant Hollywood) movies and their then most admired film dates from this period - Otaka Vavra’s Krakatit from the work of  Karel Capek, whose play RUR familiarised the word “Robot”.

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

During this time, experimental theater director Alfréd Radok was preparing a two part film about the persecution of Jews before and during the war. Radok came from a part Jewish family and had escaped a World War Two labor camp. He had relatives who had passed through Theresienstadt where his eventual single film is largely set and partly filmed. An uncle had died there. Going into the facility for his production was reportedly a harrowing experiece.

Radok had chosen a big ask - the subject was extraordinarily sensitive and would draw close examination while at the same time he had to attract a paying audience to watch the film in Commercial Theaters as a dramatic entertainment - and he was working without precedent.

It’s Polish counterpart, Wanda Jakubowska’s Ostatni etap / The Last Stage set in Auschwitz had been made the year before but there is no evidence Radok had seen it. 

However he did draw on the newly accessible  American film, in  particular Citizen Kane with its use of so called deep focus, roofed sets and that film’s mix of staged material and actuality - seen here as vignetting propaganda news reel footage into Radok's dramatised scenes. The Anna Vanková camp femme fatale could have wandered in from the noir thrillers.

Krejca & Waleská

Distant Journey moves from a realistic depiction of WW2 Prague, where lead Blanka Waleská plays a Jewish doctor who is banned from practicing by her superior, anticipating the action of invading Germans.  This doesn’t prevent her marriage to fellow doctor Otomar Krejca, who will face the war with her.

To dramatise the account of this couple, Radok draws on his experience not in film but theatre - the devices of  expressionism, surrealism and symbolism. This is telegraphed by opening titles where menacing expressionist shadows fall on the grim brick wall.  We get the repeated “Zidi ven” graffiti, the closet emptying of  yellow star black overcoats, the iron cross found among discarded goods in the junk man’s warehouse.

When Distant Journey moves to Theresienstadt camp, theatricality becomes increasingly evident.  An outsize marionette is carried down the stairs, their orchestra turns out in the rain as a train pulls into the station and, in the scene that all the commentators remark, the camp’s women scrub the pavements preparing for an inspection, while behind them a girl’s chorus rehearses Hans Kása’s opera “Brundibár” which was written  in Theresienstadt.

Location filming in Prague and the actual camp comes with elaborate studio construction. Radok had the sophisticated facilities of the Barandow studios which had not been destroyed during the war and was possibly the best equiped facility in Eastern Europe. Set design and costuming are superior. The expert photography is however let down by what appears to be the inferior laboratory work available in the country at that stage.

By the time the now single length Distant Journey was ready for showing however, the Communist Government had taken control of Czechoslovakia. The film presented a problem for the new regime. This close to World War Two, they couldn’t be seen as being Anti Semitic but the subject matter would play uneasily with their new Russian masters. However there was a get out of jail card. This was the period of Socialist Realism and, rather than the subject matter, it was the presentation that came under criticism. Art movements like surrealism, symbolism and expressionism were being ridiculed as decadent Western elitism and counter revolutionary throughout the Soviet empire and Radok’s work was an easy target.

After a small number of initial screenings in Prague, Distant Journey was  withdrawn and not shown again for forty years. During this time Krakatit, which was surrealism, symbolism and expressionism in spades, was promoted round the world by Czechoslovak Government Cultural services.

Radok, however did not vanish. He made a couple more movies, 1953’s Divotvorný klobouk / The Magic Hat and the 1957 Dedecek automobil / The Vintage Car with Raymond Bussières, and some TV and he registers on the international scene with his Magic Lantern presentation, where its story was shown with pauses for the audience to vote how they wanted it to continue and their choice screened. Just the mechanism for doing this with theatrical gauge film must have been an extraordinary challenge. 

It was running it in New York when I was there and I thought I’d beaten the game with a chance to see the celebrated Magic Lantern. Unfortunately it closed the day I tried to book. I always regretted that.

All things come to an end and under the the Velvet Revolution the old prohibitions were revised. Radok had died in 1976 but, with the fall of  Communism, heroes did emerge. During all the decades that Distant Journey was a forbidden work, at some risk, the Czechoslovakian Film archive preserved the duplicating materials. They were able to strike new film copies and in 1991 Distant Journey was widely shown around the country and hailed as a major work.

However - and this is interesting - without the nostalgia audience, publicity, press and festival showings generated by a first run, Distant Journey remained virtually unshown outside its country of origin. Meanwhile National Events and sub-titled re-issues had ensured the place in film history of The Last Stage.

It is only now, after another thirty years, that Distant Journey is becoming known, following a major World War Two exhibition at the London Imperial War Museum where, as a banned Czechoslovak war film, it was major a talking point in a new sub-titled digital restoration. The Australian Jewish Film Festival screenings are part of the flow on from that.

Seen today Distant Journey appears glum and theatrical with its bursts of loud dramatic music and comic strip Nazis, like the Gestapo man in a leather overcoat who stops the leads in the street, screwing his monocle into his eye. Potentially interesting characters are not explored - Anna Vanková’s vamp or the Theresienstadt guard whose menacing appearance at their door sets up a false expectation, when he brings the leads messages from their imprisoned families.

Daleká cesta / Distant Journey

However moments do ring true - the woman dragged out of the induction crowd and thrown against the wall for laughing or discovering a familiar face in the orchestra. The climax is vivid. Dr. Blanka Waleská learns of their tormentors’ defeat while in the Typhus ward surrounded by dying patients. This belongs in a more substantial film. In a context like the London presentation, the film can be seen as a pioneer Holocaust study, the attempt of a serious artist to represent horrors that he had experienced personally.

Better films would follow - Italian Marxist Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo or Lina Wertmuller’s Pasqualino Settebellezze / Seven Beauties. From the grotesque British 1941 Gasbags to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella, it is surprising how many of these are comedies. They share the subject with a swarm of inferior films, mainly pouring out of the Soviets and emphasising liberation by the People’s Red Army.

You can take away from all this anything you want but to me one clear message is the absolute fatuity of censorship. It is largely because its opponents suppressed it, that Distant Journey is the only forties Czech film being seen around the world today.

Barrie Pattison 2022