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Posted: |
Jan 22, 2011 - 6:34 PM
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By: |
ToneRow
(Member)
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Sure.
The music from ADRIFT is performed by the symphony orchestra of Prague, with chorus.
Its styles can be described in 3 parts:
The majority of this score is orchestral and choral; the overall mood is sad.
There is the sense of enchantment with nature, like with a forest and lake.
The orchestral & choral parts are not that distant from the French Impressionism of a Maurice Ravel, though at times Zdenek Liska sounds as if he wants to achieve an ecstatic quality, like a symphonic poem of Skryabin.
There's also the sad twang of the Cimbalom in the fabric, and sometimes Cymbal tapping can be heard as a beat.
The second aspect of this album sounds rather like a Gypsy Carnival, surfacing as a motif about 3 times. I don't know if its an Organ or a Calliope, but, whatever it is, the result is not unlike a Nino Rota circus sound coming out of a Fellini movie.
Lastly, a military brass marching band crops up twice - a commonplace practice with LPs at the time, including source music to break up the flow of the score.
In summary, if you like the choral passages in John Barry's THE LAST VALLEY, you might want to give Liska's ADRIFT a chance. ADRIFT is not for anyone who wants the Americana and machismo of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN 
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Posted: |
Dec 28, 2014 - 11:21 AM
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By: |
Bob DiMucci
(Member)
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Hungarian-born Ján Kadár began his directing career in Bratislava, Slovakia, after World War II with the documentary “Life Is Rising from the Ruins” (“Na troskách vyrastá život,” 1945). Starting in 1952, and working with his directing partner Elmar Klos, Kadár made a number of films that touted the obligatory Marxist-Leninist doctrine and adhered to Socialist-Realist filmmaking, while also bouncing between comedy and blatant propaganda.
Kadár’s biggest success came in 1965 with “The Shop On Main Street,” about the Aryanization program during World War II in the Slovak State. The film played Cannes and later won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
In late July 1968, Kadár began work on the first motion picture co-production between Czechoslovakia and the United States. MPO Videotronics, one of the largest American producers of television commercials and industrial films, had signed Kadár and Klos to an exclusive one-year contract. Although Klos is credited onscreen as “associate director” and with co-writing the screenplay, according to Variety he functioned “more on the lines of a producer, although Julius Potocsny gets this billing.” Potocsny was an executive with MPO Videotronics, the American company co-financing the picture.
The working title of the Czechoslovakian-U.S. co-production was “Adrift in the Water.” It was based on the 1937 novel Etwas treibt im wasser (Something Is Adrift in the Water) by Lajos Zilahy. The film’s eventual title, when it was released in the U.S., was ADRIFT, and it was released in Czechoslovakia as “Touha zvaná Anada” (“A Longing Called Anada”). The film is about a fisherman who saves Anada, a woman adrift, from drowning. He takes her to his home, and protects her. Eventually, she occupies a larger place in his life than was to be expected.
ADRIFT was filmed on location on the banks of the Danube, just north of the town of Bratislava, and at Studio Barrandov in Prague. The picture was twenty-five percent completed when, on 20 August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia and production had to be shut down, in large part because the Soviets erected a temporary military bridge at the shooting location.
Kadár then came to the U.S., where he directed his first English-language film, THE ANGEL LEVINE, which was eventually released in 1970. In mid-1969, however, after Russian restrictions in Czechoslovakia were relaxed, Kadár was able to return to his native country. Re-assembling the same cast and crew, Kadár finished production on ADRIFT.
Kadár originally planned on producing Czech and English-language versions of the film, both of which would be distributed in the U.S. But the English version was abandoned, and ADRIFT was completely filmed in Czech. The finished picture was distributed in the U.S. with English subtitles. American model-actress Paula Pritchett, who played the woman adrift, needed to be dubbed into Czech for the film. Kadár had her say her lines phonetically in Czech rather than in English, so that the dubbing would match her mouth movements.
Upon its release in Czechoslovakia in 1970, ADRIFT established a record as the longest-running Czech film in its native country. But the film was later pulled out of Prague theatres and banned in Czechoslovakia because Kadár was considered to be "a defector” due to his prolonged absence from his home.
In the U.S, the film generally received a number of favorable reviews when it premiered in New York in June 1971. Saturday Review’s Arthur Knight hailed the film as “Hauntingly beautiful, thematically tantalizing—Kadár’s artful mingling of the past, present, and future is intriguing, and his small cast performs to perfection.” Judith Crist felt that “the success of this new work stems from [Kadár’s] return to his roots and the particular people and places that he can translate so touchingly into universal terms. . . . We are indeed set adrift in a film so rich with personal feeling that our private experience must formulate the response. And this is an exciting experience.”
But outside of New York, the critics were not so kind. Roger Ebert said that “after giving ADRIFT a lot of thought, I have arrived at the conclusion that its simplicity is not seeming, but actual [and] there is no philosophical lesson to be learned.” And the Los Angeles Times’ Charles Champlin said that ADRIFT “gathers together almost all the things which people who don’t like foreign films don’t like about foreign films. ADRIFT is very nearly uninterruptedly lugubrious.”
For the past 40 years, it’s been hard to tell who is correct about the film, since it has never had a English-accessible video release. Although there is a 1971 copyright statement for MPO Productions, Inc. in the opening credits, the picture was not registered for copyright. According to one source, the only extant print available with English subtitles was in very poor condition with many of the subtitles obscured. Recently, someone posted the film to YouTube. The subtitles were created afresh from a variety of sources and were combined with a Czech-language VHS rip. Although various reviews gave the film’s original running time as anywhere between 102-110 minutes, the YouTube version runs just 100 minutes.
ADRIFT marked the last collaboration between Jan Kadár and Elmar Klos. Kadár would go on to film LIES MY FATHER TOLD ME (1975) and several TV movies before his death in 1979.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUy6v6sOP4M
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