It helps when first watching The Party and the Guests not to know a thing about its plot or the film’s fate, about Jan Němec, about FAMU (the Prague film school) and Czech New Wave cinema, about post-1948 Czechoslovak society and that state’s government and the Union of which it was part. It helps to be a real idiot, ignorant of these facts of history, and it helps to be a careful observer of people, alert to our nonverbal communicative powers, attentive to how the human character is underwritten by our moment-by-moment reactions to the behaviour of others.
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