“Ukrizovana was the second film made by Orlicky in Prague, after Moderni Magdalena (Modern Magdalena, 1921). Afterward the Russian director started filming Soubol s Bohem (Duel with God, 1921), his last film in Prague. Orlicky belonged to the group of Russian exiles coming to Prague between the onset of the Revolution and the early 20’s: as we all know, this group included also Formalist Roman Jakobson, later founder and major protagonist of Prague’s Linguistic Circle and Structuralism. However, the Bohemian capital did not seem to have had a strong attraction power in cinema for the Russian exiles: a group of actors from Moscow’s Art Theatre passed through Prague in the early 20’s without leaving any significant trace; a Russian actor, V. Ch. Vladimirov, worked for a long time with Vaclav Binovec in the early 20’s, later to become a director in the second half of that decade, fully assimilated into Czech production; Vera Baranovskaja, menorable protagonist of The Mother (1926) by Pudovkin, would confirm her status as extraordinary actress and icon of social cinema with Takovy je zivot (Such is life, 1929) by Junghans and Tonka šibenice (Tonka of the scaffold, 1930) by Anton, both shot in Prague. However, as we can see, these are isolated episodes, which cannot be compared with French and German productions. Probably the basic difference is to be found in the still limited development of Czech cinema, incapable of finding place for directors, actors and technicians, as instead it happened in Berlin or Paris.

Ukrizovana, like Moderni Magdalena, was the adaptation of Jakub Arbes’s novel, a Czech writer who lived in the period spanning the two centuries. Arbes is usually considered the inventor of a specific literary genre, called romaneto (short novel) in Czech: short pieces, whose clear social and Socialist themes are combined with elements derived from serialised literature and Gothic novels. Therefore, recognition, revelations, knotty circumstances, frightful situations and historical scenarios are combined with humanitarian messages, social denunciation, morality plays. Orlicky’s film is no exception to this rule, as it depicts the story of a Jewish girl and a Czech officer against the background of the 1948 revolution. The Prague revolt against the Habsburg rule, the pogroms against the Jews, religious figures torn between their vows and lust for the flesh are just a few elements of this particular melodrama”.

Francesco Pitassio