Closely Watched Trains wins the Oscar

2017

Jiří Menzel in 2017. His debut feature won the foreign-language Oscar in April 1968, four months before the tanks arrived. Place: Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, Los Angeles · Barrandov Studios, Prague Figures: Jiří Menzel, director · Bohumil Hrabal, novelist · Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Ján Kadár, Elmar Klos, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer (the New Wave still working in Prague) Jiří Menzel is twenty-eight, a graduate of FAMU (the Prague film school), when he adapts Bohumil Hrabal's novella Ostře sledované vlaky: a young station-master's apprentice in a sleepy wartime Bohemian railway halt loses his virginity, joins the resistance almost by accident, and dies stamping a German munitions train. The film is funny, slow, indirect, and brief (ninety-three minutes). Hrabal co-writes the screenplay; the village is the one he worked in himself during the Occupation. It wins the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film on 10 April 1968, eleven weeks into Dubček's reforms. Czechoslovak cinema has now won two Oscars in three years; Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos took the same prize in 1965 for Obchod na korze (The Shop on Main Street), a film about an old Jewish woman in a Slovak town and the Aryanizer assigned to her button shop. The subject dates from 1968; this photograph was taken in 2017.