A Never-Ending Cycle of Futility - The Realist Aesthetic of Memory in Jires's "The Joke" (1969)

Alicia Chmielewski
1-31-07

Jaromil Jires, The Joke (1969)

If Jaromil Jires’s 1969 film, The Joke, banned almost immediately after its release, makes us experience anything, it makes us experience a continued frustration that cannot be forgotten or relieved. The frustration stems from Ludvik’s inability to come to terms with his past – and understandably so. As the narrative unfurls, Jires paints a vivid picture of the communist ‘50’s, focusing on public ceremonies and celebrations, particularly in sequences presented as footage from the 1948 installation of the new communist state. He recalls Margaret, presumably his first love, whom he calls “the spirit of the time.” Margaret was a loyal communist, enthusiastic about her chance to attend a special course about politics and dedicated to the state above all else. For her, the political and personal were interchangeable. When Margaret writes Ludvik a letter which says how she is learning about Trotsky and being optimistic, his sarcasm leads him to reply: “Optimism is the opium of mankind. Long live Trotsky!” – an unknowing fatal mistake as Margaret feels it her duty to share his comments with others of the university, eventually causing his expulsion and re-location to a type of army work camp and to the mines for a total of six years.

Ludvik’s tragic tale is so fascinating to us as viewers because of the specific way that it is presented on screen. It is not told in a linear fashion, either from the past to the future or as one flashback from Ludvik’s future position to the past. Instead, the narrative immediately draws us into Ludvik’s psychological state by immediately raising questions in our minds about the way he begins to describe his current situation of returning to a town in which he would avoid any old friend he may run into. He immediately conveys an emotional desire to be distanced from his hometown through such descriptions and the desire to go unnoticed upon his return. This immediately sets up the relationship between location and memory that is further expounded on throughout most of the rest of the film.

Jires is also the only director I have knowledge of that is able to produce such a realist account of the way memory impacts the psychology of a person for the rest of their life. Just as certain images, sounds and locations become triggers for our memories, which often come to us as daydreams, during an ordinary day to day interaction or experience, so too is the case for Ludvik within the narrative of the film. Jires uses classic continuity editing to draw us directly into this experience. In one shot, Ludvik is watching a children’s ceremony similar to a baptism and in the reverse shot that follows, he is transported back to a university assembly during which he is voted to be expelled for his anti-communist ideals on optimism and Trotsky. This sequence seems to ironically compare present-day Czechoslovakia to the Czechoslovakia of Ludvik’s past; the same geographical state nationalistically welcomes children who will grow to presumably (from comments later made throughout the film about the younger generations) be more concerned with themselves than with their government that exiled Ludvik to the “Enemies of the Republic” special military battalion twenty years before. It is a type of dark nostalgic remembering that Ludvik experiences during similar sequences throughout the film that blur the line between realistic, in-the-moment experiences and the remembrance of the past.

The inability to control his memory and his desire to seek revenge on those who have placed him in such a psychological condition are what leave Ludvik in a constant state of frustration. Every time he attempts to get some release from it, such as when he plans to seek revenge on Pavel by sleeping with his wife Helena, his plans backfire and he is trapped within a new, equally frustrating situation. For example, after sleeping with Helena, the woman he becomes obsessed with because he hates her so much it is almost like being in love, he finds out that she and Pavel have been separated for three years. Moreover, Pavel has a younger mistress of his own, making this no revenge at all. And, to make the situation even more over-the-top in terms of adding insult to injury, Ludvik is now trapped in a relationship with Helena, who desperately clings to him, begging him not to let her go.

The only outlet Ludvik has to gain any satisfaction is ultimately unfulfilling. Helena’s younger admirer seeks him out for a fight and Ludvik is successful in defeating him (a possible commentary on his older-generation superiority), yet he gains no satisfaction but is further frustrated because he was not able to beat up who he really wanted to seek revenge on. Had Ludvik been satisfied, the situation may have commented further on the generational gap and been a way for Ludvik to take his frustrations out on the young who do not carry his haunting burden of the Czechoslovakia of the past. The fact that the young people are only concerned with themselves does not seem to be too problematic within the film, however. Even in his intense frustration, there is a sense of nostalgia around the events of Ludvik’s somewhat tortured, yet not wholly tragically represented past.

Perhaps this is because struggle is something that has to be remembered and passed on to the next generations, even if only through the young realizing that such a generational gap exists. Struggle defines individuals and nations and frustration, even when unfulfilled, at least provides a meaningful interaction with the past. In this case, a past that could not be presented in such a monumental and powerfully frustrating way in post- August 1968 Czechoslovakia.