‘이리 멘젤’ 영화의 희극성 고찰 - <가까이에서 본 기차>와 <줄 위의 종달새>를 중심으로 -

Abstract

This thesis aims to look into Jiri Menzel's world of movies focusing on his two masterpieces of <Closely Watched Trains> and <Larks on a String>, which served him with a solid place in the history of Czech movies up to now. Like Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel was also more influenced by Czech novelists than by Western movie directors. This thesis first looks at the characteristics of Menzel's movies emerging from the peculiarity of history and then enumerates the attributes of his movies adapted from Bohumil Hrabal's novels. This will be the work of tracing the extraordinary record of performances in which an artist has survived in inevitably repressive social situations,enabling us to reconfirm the value of paradoxical aesthetics derived from all the ages. It is not possible to find a unified aesthetics in New-Wave movies of Czech. Instead, trends of Czech movies can be explained in divisions of diverse genres such as comedy, realism, politics, advance guard,surrealism, etc. Of them all, Jiri Menzal is illustrated by comedy and lyricism. Comicality in his movies is the idea assuming the lyricism and sorrow of artistic expression, and using this comic sensitivity he managed to avoid the eye of the censors in his time. Thus, the hero's funny character in Menzel’s movies was devised to avoid censorship through ‘a petty bourgeois personal, passive and incompetent.’ This feature is also in line with ‘the passive resistant spirit against the rigidity of a communist society’ shown in Hrabal's novels. <Closely Watched Trains> is the work that adopted a chronological plot shedding the non-chronological order of the original novel. The movie uses narration through the hero’s first-person point of view, On the other hand, <Larks on a String> uses its background waste iron dump as if it were the stage. By dramatizing a movie, Menzel succeeded in allowing the producer to have a voice. If we have to call his movies dramatic, it seems more like a tragedy than a comedy. Dramatizing performance of distancing from reality can be read in terms of distancing effect, or Menzel can also be interpreted in relation to ‘social or political significance’ as with Brecht. <Closely Watched Trains> and <Larks on a String> are both the movies that refer to the theme in an effective manner. In these works,director Menzel expressed his theme in concealment rather than by direct exposure. <Larks on a String> keeps hidden a doubt about socialism, while <Closely Watched Trains> Czech international situation. To conclude, Jiri Menzel is considered an author who has completed an excellent ‘movie as resistance arts’ through his ‘intellect and perseverance.’