Jaromil Jireš | Sál ztracených kroků (The Hall of Lost Footsteps) / 1960

train connection

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jurai Jakubisko and Jaromil Jireš (screenplay), Jaromil Jireš (director) Sál ztracených kroků (The Hall of Lost Footsteps) / 1960

 

        The Prague Central Station, what Jireš describes as The Hall of Lost Footsteps, is the focus of his politically challenging film from 1960, which requires us to make connections past and present.

       While demonstrating an average day in which people from all walks of Czech life have gathered there to travel through the country and Europe, the director also insists that we look backward to the many trains full of Jews and others being carted away through that station to be taken to the death camps in Auschwitz, Treblinka, and elsewhere. And in this sense, the everyday citizens of today become quickly interconnected with the horrors of the past.

       Just as in World War II under Nazi control we are reminded in this mix of neo-realist narrative and haunting documentary that so too were the thousands of individuals that the Germans pulled away to the camps, everyday folk, basically just going about their business.

        Using stock images from the camps to help remind us of the horrors those so-called “travelers” would face at their destination’s end, forcing us to look into their faces while also observing hundreds of emaciated dead bodies being tossed by the Germans into pits where they will be buried, Jireš demands that we only connect, that we first of all never forget the past and that we remember that past was not so very different from our present.

       The work consists of all the horrors that have happened—the bombing of Hiroshima being, obviously, the major one—as a result of World War II, linking that, in turn, with the day’s news that France has just detonated an atomic bomb in the Sahara.

        In a sense, for Jireš these events represent a timeline all of one piece, the vast array of people coming and going whose lives have been and will be permanently altered by traveling through the railroad halls, including that of a beautiful young girl, having just left her loving boyfriend, to return, it appears, to her school. She will not see her lover until her next vacation, and in the interim, the news of the day and recent past come to haunt her fears of not being able to return to their youthful love ever again.

        Imaginatively traveling through spaces long past and recently experienced, she suffers the terrors of being pulled away from her loved one by both what she knows about the War and what she perceives may be the horror of the future, exemplified by the atom bomb.

       If she, by film’s end, can eventually allow herself a smiling face again, it is only because of her youth and her belief, as all the young do, that life will go on and joy will find a way to enter those haunted halls from which so many of her fellow citizens never returned. 

 

Los Angeles, July 2, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).