Stuck at home on a multi-day, Covid-induced film binge (it’s early in the year for me to get it—normally it’s tradition for me to get sick after the bar’s holiday party), I tried to supplement a run-through of the Scream series by catching I Know What You Did Last Summer on Criterion Channel, although it was inexplicably taken off of their “90s Horror” collection. I moved over to their “Arthouse Horror” section to see a lot of the usual suspects (Eyes Without a Face, House, Suspiria) some not-quite-arthouse inclusions (Carnival of Souls, Night of the Living Dead), as well as a few films whose cult reputation are getting a new revitalization (Cure, Trouble Every Day). What caught my eye was Wolf’s Hole, which CC advertises as “Věra Chytilová’s subversive take on the 1980s teen-horror movie.” That is an ostensibly true bit of copy, but what “80s teen-horror” means retroactively to an American streaming audience versus what the film was doing as a product made in a Warsaw Pact country is completely different.
Wolf’s Hole follows a group of teens on an expedition camp led by the imposing patriarch “Daddy” (Miroslav Machácek) and his two children, Dingo (Tomás Palatý) and Babeta (Stepánka Cervenková), to a snow-capped mountain cabin. Here, the group of characteristically Chytilován misfit kids are to learn discipline and survival skills, but all is not what it seems. At first a paranoid POV camera, seemingly from the perspective of titular wolf, interjecting a constant unease into the narrative. As the tension builds, the hosts, as one would easily guess, aren’t what they say they are. In an American 1980s teen movie, this might mean they’re secretly serial killers, cannibals, vampires, or werewolves—some kind of monster, natural or unnatural. Since this is a Czech film (or, I should say, an Eastern Bloc film), they’re aliens.
It’s a common sci-fi twist for genre films from the Soviet sphere; Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, an Estonian film based on a Strugatsky Brothers novel, immediately springs to mind. Wolf’s Hole also has similar philosophical ponderings on authoritarianism to Piotr Szulkin’s War of the Worlds, in which the bureaucratic Martians are obviously a stand-in for Russian hegemony over Poland. Even the teenage scenario is fundamentally Eastern European: while camp settings in American films are often summer camps or cabins in the woods, in the Communist Bloc they were pioneer camps meant for exercise and education. There’s the same natural youthful excitement and coming-of-age plots, but they always have a collectivist bent and the authority figures are more ridiculously rigid. For instance, Elem Klimov’s first feature (best known for Come and See as well as his marriage to Larissa Shepitko, who Criterion has also helped garner a fraction of her career into cult status) Welcome, or No Trespassing follows a boy, Kostya (Viktor Kosykh), who gets expelled from a Young Pioneer camp after swimming by himself to an island on his own rather than staying in the swimming area as designated by the inflexible camp leader, Comrade Dynin (played by the great Thaw-era actor Yevgeny Yevstigneyev). It’s a light prodding of the Soviet system that was more common in entertainment than Westerners might realize (The Irony of Fate, for instance, one of the Soviet films with the most lasting popularity), and ultimately affirms collective responsibility and solidarity as the fellow campers help hide Kostya before Dynin himself is removed and a new era of freedom is ushered in to the camp (the film also likely serves as a cornerstone influence for Moonrise Kingdom). Wolf’s Hole, too, has a central conceit of there being one-too-many campers, and the authorities trying to get the kids to give up one of their own before the finale of collective sacrifice. Wolf’s Hole has much more in common with the films of its Eastern neighbors than it does, say, Humongous.
The world of cinema is as much one of curation as it is creation, and, at least in the English-language market, no company has been at the center of taste-making more than The Criterion Collection and their parent company, Janus Films. Since showing The Seventh Seal at the 55th Street Playhouse in the 1950s, they’ve established themselves as the arthouse gateway for Americans. Not gatekeepers, but ones who open the door. That comes with the caveat that the doors are selected based on personal tastes of the ones running the company, or what they think is marketable. To Criterion’s credit, especially, their breadth of curation has expanded immensely, and after their rocky streaming starts on Hulu and FilmStruck, the Criterion Channel seems to be a permanent home for their catalog—both for highlighting their flagship editions while also highlighting the kinds of underseen or ostensibly miscellaneous works that used to be housed in their Eclipse Series of DVDs. Many of those have subsequently been upgraded to full, standalone issues—Chytilová’s internationally recognized masterpiece Daisies a prime example. While it’s clearly a film that stands on its own as a great work of art, it has strangely not led to a larger interest in her filmography, despite it becoming more widely available (including on CC) in high quality.
Curation’s a double-edged sword, at once trying to introduce people to new works while also grabbing their attention with what they already know. It’s a fundamental problem in advertising art. But when you’re trying to appeal to people about the cinema in the Soviet sphere, a world of culture so misunderstood by Westerners, the default is to fall into stereotypes (critique of the system through a capitalist lens) or reference (“it’s actually like an American movie!”), creating an even deeper perceptive divide between image and reality. I remember taking a 200-level film history course in college that described post-war Soviet film as basically “Tarkovsky and then everything else,” which was less the fault of the professor and more of the canon itself. That inclination that there had to be something missing between Oleksandr Dozvhenko’s silents and Andrei Tarkovsky’s later poetic works (there’s a fair number of contemporaries at least as important as developing that “Eastern European” style). The films are more accessible than ever before, but the narrative they’re presented in still leaves a lot to be desired.