From Over There to Over Here

Television
One night 16 years ago, Vaclav Havel sat down in his pal Pavel Landovsky's dining room in Prague to read aloud Havel's new play Audience. But there was no audience. The play's raucous, comic assault on the authorities ensured it would be banned.

On Nov. 29 of last year, the Actors Studio in New York staged a modest production of Audience. On Dec. 29, Havel became Czechoslovakia's president. On Jan. 8, the Actors Studio did the show again in Prague, and two days later a second production in Czech starred Landovsky. At last, Havel got to see his play, and now you will too. PBS plans to air the English version (and a documentary on Havel's improbable life) in April.

Another promising production is coming up on PBS from Czech director Jan Nemec, who shot the footage of the 1968 Soviet invasion used in the film The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His PBS documentary profiles Czeslaw Milosz, the Nobel Prize-winning Polish émigré poet; The Poet Remembers airs April 27.

Video
The most eagerly awaited video release by an Eastern-bloc director now is Yugoslavian Rajko Grlic's That Summer of White Roses, due from Media Home Video Entertainment in July. It won the Grand Prize at last year's Tokyo Film Festival and will be screened theatrically at the San Francisco Film Festival in May. Tom Conti stars as a lifeguard who saves a Nazi (Rod Steiger) during World War II and earns the townspeople's wrath.

But most of the current Eastern-bloc video imports of note are from the Soviet Union. The International Film Exchange (IFEX), the New York film and video distributor that brought Little Vera to the U.S., offers a range of Soviet (and many other foreign) titles: Oblomov, the film of Ivan Goncharov's wonderful novel about Russia's most famous couch potato; Scarecrow, Rolan Bykov's study of children's cruelty to one another (the most popular Soviet movie of 1985); and Karen Shakhnazarov's Jazzman, a fictional history of an art form suppressed by officials who felt improvisation had no place in the land of the Five-Year Plan.

Many video stores also stock something intriguing from other bloc filmmakers: Look for Jiři Menzel's Oscar-winner Closely Watched Trains, a droll comedy about lust and idleness at a World War II Czech train station, and Krzysztof Zanussi's A Year of the Quiet Sun.