Zdeněk Liška, Composer and Co-Auteur Extraordinaire

Beginning with advertisements and short films for the Baťa shoe corporation, Zdeněk Liška (1922–1983) was a massively prolific composer who turned his formidable, Prague Conservatory-cultivated talents almost exclusively to scoring films. At once a classicist and a tireless avant-gardist who developed his own techniques to synthesise musique concrète sound design with his scores, Liška made a profound sonic-cum-dramaturgical contribution to the cinema of Czechoslovakia, peaking during its “Golden Sixties”. Jan Švankmajer observed that Liška “was able to discover rhythms that even directors weren’t aware of”; often composing at an editing table, he would sometimes recut films to produce a more integrated, rhythmic synthesis of sound and vision.

This digital restoration-packed season highlights a different dimension of Liška’s genius each week. Week one gives prominence to his gift for eerie choral scores across Švankmajer’s unsettling 1968 short, The Flat, Juraj Herz’s horror classic, The Cremator (1969), and František Vláčil’s mediaeval thriller The Valley of the Bees (1968).

Week two homes in on his passion for brass and regional folk music across Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos’ Oscar-winning The Shop on the High Street (1965) and Elo Havetta’s ebullient Celebration in the Botanical Garden (1969).

The season closes with a focus on Liška’s experimental electronic work for animation and science fiction in Karel Zeman’s ingenious The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962) and Jindřich Polák’s hugely influential Ikarie XB-1 (1963), via a beautiful Hermína Týrlová short, The Snowman (1966), before culminating in Pavel Klusák’s insightful 2017 documentary Music by Zdeněk Liška, a significant contribution to the long overdue upsurge in interest in this extraordinary composer’s work.

Presented in partnership with the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia.