Movies - The Firemen's Ball

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	Movies - The Firemen's Ball

The last film Miloš Forman would make in his native Czechoslovakia, The Firemen's Ball (Hori, ma panenko) is also the first one he shot in color and a milestone of Czech New Wave.

The film takes place in a small town's volunteer fire department where they are having their annual ball, and the plot is a collection of anecdotes that take place within that setting. The film uses no actors -- the firemen portrayed are the firemen of the small town where it is set.

Background

After the success of Loves of a Blonde
, Forman, along with fellow screenwriters Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papousek, could not concentrate on their follow-up screenplay and so went to the north-Bohemia town of Vrchlabi to hole up in a hotel and concentrate on writing. "One evening, to amuse ourselves, we went to a real firemen's ball," Forman recalls. "What we saw was such a nightmare that we couldn't stop talking about it. So we abandoned what we were writing on to start this script."

Controversy

While Forman has always maintained that the film has no "hidden symbols or double meanings", it is not hard to view it as a sly political allegory, so characteristic of the Czech New Wave. And the Czechoslovak head of state as well as the censors of the time certainly took that view. The film ran for three weeks during the Dubcek era, but after the Prague Spring crackdown, was "banned forever".

Carlo Ponti, the film's Italian producer also took umbrage and pulled his financing, leaving Forman to face a possible 10 years imprisonment for "economic damage to the state". Fortunately, producers in Paris picked up the rights and spared him of the charges. The Prague Spring invasion occurred while Forman was still in Paris courting these producers, forcing him to emigrate.

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