Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String

Any film banned by a communist regime seems particularly worthy of our attention. This was the fate of several films from the Czech New Wave of the 1960s, a movement that reclaimed forms of individual freedom that had been suppressed by the Czechoslovak government following the 1948 Communist coup. Directors such as Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, and Jiří Menzel, while strongly influenced by European film movements such as Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave, developed their own distinctive use of absurdity, irony, and humor as tools of social commentary to challenge both government censorship and the use of cinema as propaganda.¹ This movement was part of a broader search for political and personal autonomy that culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968, when Czechoslovak reformers sought to humanize communism through greater freedom of speech and a less centralized political system. Soviet leaders, however, feared that such liberalization would weaken Communist control throughout the Eastern Bloc. In response, Soviet-led forces invaded Czechoslovakia, bringing the reforms to an end and entrenching political repression and censorship for decades to come.

It is with this historical backdrop in mind that we explore one of the masterpieces of the Czech New Wave, Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String (Skřivánci na niti).² Shot in 1968 but set in the 1950s, the film follows a group of female political prisoners and “bourgeois” men assigned to manual labor in the scrapyard of a steel mill. Through its blend of dark comedy and humanism, the film portrays people imprisoned by proponents of an ideology that professes to liberate them. Menzel provocatively exposes the absurdities underlying the repressive state at a moment when reform was in the air. Yet the timing of the film’s production made its critique especially dangerous: Larks on a String was immediately banned, surviving only thanks to underground prints.

During the Prague Spring, Communist Party leader Alexander Dubček promoted the idea of “socialism with a human face.” The slogan itself is revealing, since it implicitly acknowledges that socialism in itself lacks a human face. Menzel counters the ideology’s facelessness in the very first scene of Larks on a String by giving a distinct identity to each of the principal characters suffering under the regime. When the supervisor overseeing the workers explains to a visiting film crew member how they came to be in the scrapyard, he not only describes them through their alleged offenses, but also identifies each by their former profession and personal history as the camera portrays their faces. In doing so, he inadvertently presents them as individuals rather than as an undifferentiated collective mass.

The supervisor’s extended introductions not only allow the spectator to distinguish each character as a unique person, but also reveal the extent of the regime’s repression of economic, political, religious, and personal freedom. The professor of philosophy and former chief librarian of Prague was assigned to manual labor for refusing to allow “decadent, rotten bourgeois Western literature” to be pulped in a paper mill. His offense, in effect, was defending intellectual freedom and resisting censorship. The former prosecutor was removed from his position for insisting that the defense should exist independently of the prosecution—in other words, for defending the principle of a fair trial. Tiny, a manufacturer of patented wash tubs and a small-business owner, “satisfied his bourgeois cravings by employing four workers”—as if entrepreneurship and giving people jobs were crimes. Jack-knife, the barber, was not accused of anything at all. The authorities simply decided that there were too many barbers and eliminated two out of five, disregarding both market forces and individual self-determination. The group also includes a musician, since the saxophone has been classified as a bourgeois instrument and consequently abolished. Milkman is the exception to the rule, since he is the only one there of his own volition. The supervisor explains that he closed his dairy farm because he genuinely believed in the socialist cause, adding “We’re really proud of him.” And yet, as we soon discover, Milkman proves to be the most vocal critic of the current situation at the scrapyard. Finally, there is Pavel, a chef fired from a hotel because he refused to work on Saturdays for religious reasons. When the supervisor hands him a third reprimand for that same reason, Pavel casually wraps the paper around some cutlery as a napkin.

In this system, those who were once “workers,” like the supervisor, are now in positions of authority, while those regarded as “bourgeois” have been forced into manual labor in order to be “reformed”—literally re-formed, given new shape. The scene makes this concrete through the metaphor of the scrapyard. After explaining that the scrap metal will be melted down into usable steel, the supervisor adds with unsettling enthusiasm: “We’ll smelt them, too. Into new men.” Just as scrap metal is reshaped into something with a new function, people are to be stripped of their identities and treated as raw material for the state to “re-purpose . . . into shiny new citizens of a bright socialist future,” as he puts it. Yet the individuals forced to work in the scrapyard consistently resist this intended remolding: their personalities remain vivid, their actions and opinions continue to distinguish them from one another, and each retains a voice that refuses to be silenced. There is no censorship among the men themselves as they discuss literature, philosophy, politics, current events, and religion. Even when they debate whether Europe is more Christian or Jewish, or speculate about the language spoken by God, disagreements do not lead to offensive comments or conflict. The film thus presents freedom of speech not simply as a political right but also as a social good: when nothing is taboo, disagreements allow for the exploration of diverse perspectives in an ongoing search for truth.

This resistance to homogeneity extends beyond the human characters—not even the objects in the scrapyard are portrayed as an anonymous mass. The camera repeatedly lingers on individual pieces of scrap—machines, containers, ceramics, tires, engines—rather than presenting the junkyard as one enormous heap. Wide shots could have created an impersonal image of collective waste. Instead, Menzel favors close-ups and panoramic shots that invite our eyes to dwell on the singularity of each object. The women even transform discarded metal springs into earrings and necklaces. At one point, the professor of philosophy reflects that the metal holds within it the “good old days,” recognizing an irreducible history and intrinsic value in the very objects the regime treats as waste. Among the materials destined to be melted down are typewriters and crucifixes, symbolically linking the objects’ destruction to the suppression of intellectual and religious freedom.

The regime’s attempt to manufacture obedient citizens becomes even clearer when the film crew starts setting up the mise-en-scène for a propaganda piece, complete with a colorful backdrop intended to conceal the reality of the scrapyard. The workers are assigned ideological statements—such as “Americans, jump in the sea” and “Imperialists, we’ll pour peaceful steel down your warmongering throats”—because the intended audience must see that all citizens “view the capitalists’ imperialist scheming with revulsion.” The absurdity of the scene becomes even greater when the supervisor explains that the group of women on the other side of the fence received five-year prison sentences for defecting—their only crime was attempting to escape the regime. Jitka, one of the women, is instructed to sit next to Pavel and hold his hand during the video “for the future of our young people, who love each other, who founded families to have beautiful children who will never see war or suffering, but ever-lasting peace.” Thus, an empty promise of a future utopia is juxtaposed with the reality of imprisonment in the present.

And yet this manufactured mise-en-scène inadvertently captures something genuine. When Pavel and Jitka look at each other tenderly, it is not for the camera, but rather because they are already drawn to each other. Reality intrudes more forcefully on the scene when Milkman reveals that the men are on strike. The film crew beats a hasty retreat, having failed to manufacture an image of ideological conformity in the midst of discontent. Pavel and Jitka do not immediately let go of each other’s hand, however—not until the prison guard orders them to do so. Ironically, they were instructed to display affection when it served propaganda, but they are prohibited from doing so when acting as subjects with agency of their own.

This tension between official ideology and individual agency is heightened once again when labor representatives arrive at the scrapyard. After removing his tie and changing his hat to appear more like a worker, the leader greets the men with “Čest práci,” literally, “Honor to work.” The greeting dates back to at least 1922, when it appeared in a work song, and was subsequently adopted by the Communists as the official greeting required when entering a workplace or a government office.³ One of the men returns the greeting with sarcasm: “If it’s well paid.” A discussion ensues as Milkman explains to the representative why they are on strike. Although the supervisor attempts to keep him loyal by reminding him that he is a Party member—even exclaiming “I’m one of you, I’m a worker, too”—Milkman, undeterred, objects that higher production targets were decreed by the Ministry of Heavy Industry without consulting the workers themselves. The fact that Milkman is the voice of the group is significant because he is the only one who believes in the socialist ideal. Moreover, his argument that political authorities should not impose targets arbitrarily—without input from those who possess the relevant expertise—echoes Friedrich Hayek’s insight that the knowledge needed for economic decisions is inherently dispersed among individuals, never available in its totality to any central planner.⁴ The supervisor tries to defend Milkman in front of the union representatives, referring to him as “our best worker” and a “Party member,” but no questioning of political authority is permitted. Milkman is escorted away the next morning, never to return.

Soon afterward, the film confirms that Milkman had been right about the unrealistic targets. A voice on a megaphone announces record meltdowns at another steel factory as a means of incentivizing the workers. The figures, however, hide a grim reality: according to a roller operator, half of the metal must return to the scrap pile because it is not processed correctly. By disregarding the rate at which the metal can actually be processed, the political bureaucrats who raised the targets have brought about a substantial reduction in efficiency. Thus, the new law undermines the very goal of increased production.

Throughout the film, official language attempts to impose a fiction that the camera itself exposes as false. Signs appear everywhere, handwritten on banners and printed on metal, proclaiming such slogans as “Work is a matter of honor” and “Why not be glad when working for ourselves?” Yet how can the men be said to be working for themselves when they are, in effect, forced laborers in a concentration camp? The contradiction is precisely Menzel’s point: reality cannot be transformed by a change in vocabulary. The names of government policies and institutions are likewise crafted with misleading language that obscures their sinister purpose. The Peace Protection Act, for instance, sounds benign, even positive, but its actual function is to crush dissent and silence strikers. Conversely, propaganda can also invert the truth in the opposite direction: when a teacher brings schoolchildren on a tour of the scrapyard, she points to the women prisoners and refers to their “repugnant faces soaked with imperialism.” Yet the women looking out from behind the fence are vibrant, smiling, and beautiful.

It is not only Menzel’s camera but the characters themselves who seize the occasion to expose the reality beneath the state’s fabricated facade. As the visiting teacher attempts to indoctrinate her students, the philosophy professor refuses to stay silent and counters with the truth: “Human beings are fading away. Actual people are disappearing. Milkman disappeared because he spoke about the targets.” This is the second time a worker has spoken up during a visit by someone from outside the scrapyard. Predictably, the secret police later arrive to drag the professor away as well.

In this bleak, oppressive environment, the female prisoners become the film’s clearest embodiment of quiet resistance. They sing and laugh as they toil, sometimes dancing or playfully tussling—even sending flirtatious glances to the men working on the other side of the fence. At one point, the men watch the women through holes in the fence as they undress for bed. The scene may appear voyeuristic, until one of the women waves directly at the men, acknowledging that they know they are being watched. In fact, they are purposefully putting on a show, hopping into each other’s beds and hugging each other. Menzel consistently presents the women as asserting their agency, since they are always the ones to initiate the flirtatious behavior (except for the romantic couple, Pavel and Jitka). In one scene, the women finish their own work and volunteer to help the men. Three are permitted to cross over, and they start an assembly line together. When the women remove the men’s gloves so that their hands can touch, the resulting scene transforms labor into a sensual interaction: the camera closely follows the metal as it passes from hand to hand, while also lingering from face to face. One woman pulls a man aside under the pretense that something is in his eye, then tenderly rubs her face against his. In another brief scene, a woman is caught outside at night while her lover, on the other side of the fence, runs off as he hastily dresses himself. As a result of this single clandestine encounter, she is sentenced to an additional six months in prison. The visiting teacher condemns such encounters—which risk “bearing another decadent soul poisoned with capitalism”—and laments that “work discipline seems to be fading away.”

The film’s treatment of romance and sexuality among the prisoners and workers may be read as a response to a broader feature of Stalinist ideology, under which romantic love could be considered subversive since it places value on a relationship between two people rather than on the collective or the state. Sexuality was treated not as a biological or emotional dimension of human life but as something that had to serve ideological and social purposes; otherwise, it was dismissed as a “bourgeois” distraction from class struggle.⁵ Menzel rejects this instrumentalization in his portrayal of characters, for whom love, attraction, and intimacy provide vitality and joy amidst forced, monotonous labor. In this context, love—and eroticism, more generally—is more than a private emotion: it is a refusal to let the state dictate what human beings should value and thus a means of resisting the regime’s repression.

Toward the end of the film, Pavel explicitly affirms the beauty and worthiness of the personal sphere, saying that there is “nothing lovelier in the world than family life: . . . eating, drinking, sleeping, bathing and also love-making are the most noble acts of life.” Significantly, work and the so-called collective good are excluded from his vision of what makes life meaningful. Pavel puts this philosophy into practice when he asks Jitka to marry him. While Jitka would like to wait until she is out of prison, Pavel finds it more propitious to wed on the solstice. Passing nearby, the supervisor overhears their conversation and, rather than reprimand them, unexpectedly offers to arrange the marriage. Pavel and Jitka are married by proxy: Pavel has his aunt stand in for the bride. Still inside the prison, Jitka is informed by an official that she is now legally married, and yet there is no celebration of love. Instead, the official declares that the state supports the new family in “the peaceful building of socialism,” reframing private love as merely an instrument of the collective. Nonetheless, Pavel and Jitka are each joyous to have become husband and wife, even if they remain, for the time being, physically separated.

Erotic desire takes on a different connotation, however, when mixed with power. Throughout the film, the supervisor is shown to be obsessed with hygiene, repeatedly warning people to wash their hands, asking whether they have maintained proper hygiene, and warning of the risks of catching malaria or leprosy. On a regular basis, he visits Romani children to wash their faces with a sponge, saying that cleanliness is “godliness.” Yet the practice ultimately reveals his own moral corruption. One day we discover that the wash tub he routinely asks for is not for himself, but for an adolescent girl, whom he bathes while lasciviously running the sponge across her naked body. He justifies his lecherous behavior by saying that “Our country looks over your needs with a Sanitary law.” When the older woman outside the house asks a policeman to check on the supervisor, he does not denounce the act, but instead joins in. As the two men in positions of power lather the girl’s breasts and buttocks, the camera exposes the perversion behind the supervisor’s statement that “Together we will preach the rule of hygiene.”⁶

Not everyone in a position of authority, however, is depicted negatively. Menzel provides a counterexample through the prison guard, Angel. On their wedding night, Angel’s young Romani bride avoids his amorous advances by playfully running in circles around the apartment and then out of the building. In a subsequent nighttime scene, he finds her stretched out on top of the armoire, and his reaction is to simply hand her a pillow. Near the end of the film, the couple is finally shown nestled together in a corner on the floor. The man whose job is to police women’s lives at work does not claim authority in his private life, but patiently adapts to his wife’s needs. Angel’s endearing character thus demonstrates that participation in an oppressive system does not necessarily extinguish an individual’s capacity for empathy and understanding.

Angel’s regard for individual autonomy extends beyond his relationship with his wife to his own encounter with the scrap pile. As the prisoners toss out crucifixes, the objects are seemingly stripped of their sacred aura and treated as mere waste. Yet Angel finds himself drawn to the painting of a guardian angel watching over two children. The film returns to the image in close-up various times, emphasizing the guard’s inexplicable attraction to it. Eventually, he takes the painting from the scrap pile and hides it beneath his jacket. Later in the film, we find it hanging in his bedroom. Thus, although Angel is employed to enforce the rules of a state that officially rejects religion, he acts as an individual capable of free will when he discovers a sacred image that holds meaning for him.

As the film progresses, Angel also appears to soften toward the prisoners. In Angel’s absence, the women cross over to join the men as they warm their hands around a fire in the rain. Their hands form a circle around the flames as the camera moves from one smiling face to another. When Angel discovers them together upon his return, rather than separating them, he joins the circle. We could read this as an acknowledgment that Angel is imprisoned by the system just as much as those condemned to work in the scrapyard. As Amelia Leonard has remarked, “under communism everyone becomes a prisoner, even those on the ‘other side.’”⁷ At the same time, the image of the prisoners, workers, and prison guard forming a circle around the fire is also irrepressibly hopeful, a vision of human beings, without any sense of hierarchy, sharing warmth and companionship in open defiance of the rules.

The themes of romantic love and of outspoken dissent converge in the final dramatic scene of the film. The day after Jitka and Pavel’s wedding, the couple is to be allowed to consummate their marriage in a small cabin on the site of the scrapyard. Yet just as Pavel is heading toward the cabin where Jitka waits expectantly, it happens that another delegation arrives at the scrapyard—this time an elderly politician and his entourage. Pavel is instructed to remain with the others and join the applauding crowd. The politician walks over to him, perhaps drawn by the bouquet of flowers Pavel was bringing to Jitka. When the politician asks him a question, Pavel replies with a question of his own, asking what has happened to Milkman and the professor, adding “and where are the good old days when people respected and loved each other?” Pavel is aware of the consequences, and yet—even at the very moment in which he is about to join his bride—he risks everything to speak up. Shortly thereafter, still clutching the flowers, he is hauled into a car and whisked away. This is thus the third time in the film that someone reveals an inconvenient truth, rejecting the state’s attempt to impose official propaganda on lived reality, and has paid a price for it.

Larks on a String, however, is less a denunciation of totalitarian government than a celebration of human resilience. The fact that workers cannot be melted down like scrap metal, indistinguishable from one another, is reinforced through a striking visual metaphor. Two men converse along a wall as it is being spray-painted white, and the whitewasher paints over them as if they were not there. For a moment, their bodies blend into the wall and seem to vanish, suggesting the system’s attempt to erase their individuality—objects to be painted over rather than people to be seen. Yet in the next moment they step away, revealing both the wall’s original color behind them and the sharp outlines of their bodies that the whitewash could not eliminate. In the end, the act of whitewashing becomes not an erasure but an unintended record of the men’s presence.

The final scene of the film brings this theme to its darkest, yet paradoxically most hopeful, conclusion. Pavel has been sentenced to two years of forced labor, this time in a mine, where he finds Milkman and the professor. Jitka, now released from prison, has found work washing dishes in the camp kitchen. When she spots Pavel being led toward the mine, she shines a light onto his face with a pocket mirror, just as he had once shone light onto her face from across the scrapyard. As Pavel and his fellow prisoners descend into the mine shaft, the professor refuses to surrender inwardly, speaking instead of overcoming sorrow and wrath: “I’m so happy, I’ve found myself.” Pavel smiles and looks up. As the men drop deeper and deeper into the darkness—a movement depicted as a sort of descent into Hell—the camera gives us a subjective shot of the men looking up at the light that is becoming increasingly smaller. In this final, infernal image, we are placed in the position of the men as our own gaze is likewise fixed on the diminishing light at the center of the screen. The image captures the duality at the heart of the film: the state can control their bodies—imprison them, force them to work, separate them from their loved ones, and send them to the depths of the earth to extract minerals—but it cannot control their minds, break their spirits, or prevent them from looking toward the light. Given the film’s many references to philosophers, it is hard not to think of Boethius in this final scene. Imprisoned on false charges of treason, Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, in which he converses with Lady Fortune about fate and the possibility of happiness despite suffering injustice. His central question is, in essence, the one Menzel poses as well: what can an oppressive external power actually take from you, if happiness and dignity are to be found within yourself?

Czechoslovakia’s history makes this conclusion even more poignant—and the ending’s paradoxical optimism even more prescient. In 1989, the nonviolent Velvet Revolution overthrew the country’s communist rule, ending forty-one years of political repression and the denial of basic civil liberties. Larks on a String was finally released, premiering at the 1990 Berlin Film Festival, where it won the prestigious Golden Bear for Best Film. Through its dark humor, lyrical cinematography, eroticism, absurdity, and profound humanism, Larks on a String ultimately argues that the most powerful form of resistance to tyranny is the preservation of one’s own humanity.