An excerpt from the booklet essay by Jonathan Owen.

Barnabáš Kos first greeted the world in 1954, as the ‘hero’ of Peter Karvaš’s short story ‘The Rise and Fall of Barnabáš Kos’, published in Karvaš’s satirical story collection The Devil Never Sleeps. Appearing at the height of a ‘state-wide campaign’ across Czechoslovakia for the development of satire in the arts, the story attracted immediate interest from both Czech and Slovak sides of the film industry. It was the most prized story in Karvaš’s collection: Martin Kaňuch suggests that Solan and Žáček’s film The Devil Never Sleeps – which adapts other stories from the collection – was essentially a ‘replacement plan’ when ‘Barnabáš Kos’ proved unattainable. Karvaš began his first attempt at adapting the story in 1954, writing a script with Czech screenwriter Ivan Osvald for Prague’s Barrandov Studios. This attempt came to a halt in 1956, when the script – which apparently downplayed the story’s satirical elements in favour of more madcap humour – was rejected for failing to reconcile literary, satirical and cinematic elements. A second attempt was begun at Slovakia’s Koliba Studios in 1957 by Solan, working with Karvaš and screenwriter Maximilián Nitra. This version, in contrast to the previous one, emphasised the story’s satirical elements and intensified its critique of communist bureaucracy, taking the daring step of modelling the mysterious figure of the ‘Deputy’ – the high-ranking functionary ultimately responsible for Kos’s appointment – more or less explicitly on the real-life former head of Slovak film, Pavol Dubovský. Though this version saw its literary (i.e. pre-technical) script approved and got as far as shooting preparations, it was ultimately shut down too.

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By the early 1960s, though, political-cultural conditions had changed again. Film-industry officialdom now proclaimed a ‘battle against schematism’, denounced ‘auto-censorship’ and welcomed the reappearance of satire. In this newly reformist climate Barnabáš Kos could be considered less a ‘dispiriting and hopeless’ work and more a ‘required critique’ of an individual who, elevated to an important function beyond his capacities, ‘becomes a wrecker of society and himself’. Solan restarted the project in 1963 and a new script was written – for, as Solan argued, since the time of the previous version ‘many things have become outdated and we are also wiser.’ The new script was written by Karvaš together with Albert Marenčin. Marenčin’s screenwriting credits included co-authorship of The Song of the Grey Pigeon – that first salvo towards a new Slovak cinema – and an earlier collaboration with Karvaš on the gripping Midnight Mass (Polnočná omša, 1962, directed by Jiří Krejčík), adapted from Karvaš’s play. His greatest contribution to cinema, though, was to lie not in screenwriting but in his role as chief dramaturge of the Slovak film industry’s First Creative Group, where he fostered an extraordinary run of artistic accomplishments that culminated in the bravura late-1960s New Wave of Juraj Jakubisko, Elo Havetta and Dušan Hanák.

The third and final version of Barnabáš Kos was, as Solan indicated, significantly updated, reclothed and remodelled in the styles of a new era. Its shift of focus from an individual authority figure to an ‘impenetrable’, nonsensical bureaucratic system – and the representation of that system in highly stylised and bizarre visual terms – reveal the newfound influences of Franz Kafka and the Theatre of the Absurd, forces that loomed large over Czechoslovak culture in the 1960s. But if this was a response to wider cultural trends, it still came early in the game. 1963, the year when Solan, Karvaš and Marenčin began work on the final version, was also the year of both the watershed conference on Kafka in Liblice – an effective rehabilitation of the long-dead, long-condemned Prague writer’s work – and of Juráček and Schmidt’s Josef Kilián, that outstanding inauguration of the Kafkaesque into Czechoslovak cinema. Later that same year, Prague’s Theatre on the Balustrade (Divadlo na zábradlí) presented the first full-length play by Absurd dramatist (and future dissident and president) Václav Havel, The Garden Party (Zahradní slavnost), followed by a stream of classic absurdist and proto-absurdist works by Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Alfred Jarry and, of course, Kafka.

Jonathan Owen’s complete essay, from which this excerpt is taken, appears in the booklet which accompanies the release.