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An unusual 1960s film concept is revived
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May 14th, 2008 issue

By Rachel Shimp

COURTESY PHOTO
It's not that bad: Kinoautomat offers more than one solution May 14-16.
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One Man and His House (Kinoautomat:


Directed by Radúz Činčera
With Miroslav Horníček, Leopolda Dostalová, Libuše Švormová, Karla Chadimová, Miroslav Macháček and Josef Somr

For the Post
 A speaker addresses a congress in a great hall. He asks the group, “And now, who is fulfilling the Communist Party’s program?” Everyone raises their hands.
“Who is for meeting the plan’s targets at 150 percent?” Every hand rises again.
“And now, who is for letting the comrade Miss Svobodová, completely naked, into comrade Novák’s flat?”
That question — which essentially kick-starts the narrative in Kinoautomat: Člověk a jeho dům (One Man and His House), the world’s first interactive film — is parodied to hilarious effect in a promotional clip made by a Czech-based group called STEPECrew. Shown in advance of Kinoautomat’s revival screening at Světozor in 2007, its dubbing gave a communist congress documentary new voices “to demonstrate the absurdity of the regime in contrast to free voting in a film.”
In the satirical clip, everyone is for letting Miss Svobodová inside. Given the choice to lock her out, they’re for that, too. The speaker calls them idiots, then declares that Kinoautomat is “the only free vote in our country.” Maybe, maybe not. But the clip does show the atmosphere of artistic suppression that Czech New Wave directors worked under at the time of the making of Kinoautomat, which is being revived again at Světozor this week.
Director Radúz Činčera’s concept — loosely translated as “movie vending machine” — premiered at the Czechoslovak Pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal. It combined the story of a day in the life of Mr. Novak (Miroslav Horníček) with periodic interruptions from onstage moderators, during which the cinema audience could decide on the next plot turn. At their seats were two buttons, red and green. The moderator would explain the two options, and after the audience had voted, the projectionist would select the appropriate reel. Ultimately (and unknown to the audience), the options eventually led to the same next choice. But it was still great fun.
The film ran for six months in Montreal. Before last year’s revival at Světozor and at London’s National Film Theatre, it had last been screened with live voting in 1974. While this week’s screenings are in the original Czech, Jiří Šebesta of Kino Aero and Kino Světozor says that an English-moderated screening will hopefully be ready later this summer. Until then, the curious can pick up the newly-released DVD, which features versions in both Czech and English.
How much fun can an interactive film be when the interaction is between yourself and a TV or computer screen? Not as much as with a theater full of people, but enough. The first thing you see is the narrator, a woman who explains the history of Kinoautomat, and how it will work at home. With the film behind her, she introduces Mr. Novák and the action begins.
Mr. Novák describes how calm and lovely his apartment building’s community is, while a fire forces them to jump out of their windows. The people and their quirks are introduced as each one slides down the chute. He looks up and sighs, “I’m to blame for all this.”
The narrator reappears and explains that we’ll retrace Mr. Novák’s steps throughout the day, trying to figure out where things went wrong. There are series of sticky situations for Mr. Novák, which act as moral dilemmas.  In all, there are 10 places where the action stops. To choose the course at these points, a red and a green button onscreen turns into a clickable object for 10 seconds. The DVD doesn’t have chapters, so you can’t go back to your choice, though at one point the narrator does it for you, to prove that the film really does “work.”
Her interjections can be a bit over-explanatory, but they also take interesting modern liberties. Kinoautomat sometimes shows its female characters acting with stereotypical “hysteria,” which made me wonder if that was tempered with live commentary in 1967. On DVD, the narrator adds comments like, “Ladies have more imagination and can easily picture the situation with all possibilities and consequences.”
In 1998, a year before director Činčera’s passing in Prague, researcher Michael Naimark met him for an interview. He wrote that Činčera wanted Kinoautomat to be a comedy, and since viewers always end up at the same point in the narrative, also a satire of democracy. “(w)here everyone votes but it doesn’t make any difference,” wrote Naimark.  
My suggestion to those who don’t know enough Czech to see the cinema screenings is to throw a Kinoautomat party at home. With only one set of red and green buttons, there may be some argument about which plot developments to choose. But we already know how everyone will vote for Miss Svobodová, at least.
Rachel Shimp can be reached at rshimp@praguepost.com


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