Based on Bohumil Hrabal’s collection of short stories, “Pearls of the Deep”, an eponymous omnibus film was produced in 1966 and became a manifesto of the Czech New Wave. Věra Chytilová adapted one of the stories, which begins in the “World” cafeteria with a drunken wedding and a young woman’s suicide. Starting in half-documentary neon light, the film increasingly takes on somnambulistic characteristics.

André Eckardt