Cinematographer Vladimír Smutný came to the Municipal Theatre for the gala presentation of the Czechoslovak film from the year 1983 The End of Berhof. Before the film started, a set of clips was shown commemorating the extensive work of this cinematographer and this year’s winner of the Festival President Award.
Following this, the drama set in the Czech-Polish-German border region after World War II transported the audience into the dangerous environs of the post-war Sudetenland. At that time, remnants of armed groups of German marauders were hiding in the woods, trying to get across the border to Germany, leaving corpses in their wake after their forced “visits” to the solitary local farms. Jiří Svoboda’s monumental drama is full of despair and cruelty, but also mercy, illustrated by Smutný’s melancholic shots.
For a cinematographer who has a long list of works behind him, including Kolya, The End of Berhof was one of his first. “I shot the film in the light of kerosene lamps in order to better capture the dramatic atmosphere. The film is a ‘concentration’ of everything that I liked then and later as a cinematographer: long and wide lenses, often underexposed shots. I was fairly adventurous, for example when the shot was to be lit only from the stove, I put a light bulb right in the stove and that was my sole source of light,” Smutný said, describing a number of technical aspects of filming.
