Gulliver’s Travels Reimagined: A Case For A Rookie Hangman Reviewed

Like the poem the Poet (Frantisek Husák) writes, A Case for A Rookie Hangman (1969) is “About a hare that wore clothes.” It’s also about a car that drives better without a driver, a village idiot who thinks nothing exists beyond the horizon, and a walnut that won’t stop rolling on the floor.

“What’s anti-state about that?” a woman asks the Poet and while she’s never given an answer, a truthful response would be “not necessarily anything.” Pavel Juráček never directed another feature film after A Case for A Rookie Hangman, so the film is at least anti-state enough to prematurely end his career and get him exiled from the Czech Republic (Michael Brooke explains how this happened in his booklet essay, The Key to Determining Pavel Juráček).
It would’ve been a career, too. Besides having already released some of the films Juráček worked on as a screenwriter (including Daisies, which he co-wrote with Vera Chytilová and Ester Krumbachová), Second Run’s Blu-Ray of A Case for a Rookie Hangman includes two short films and a short feature that he worked on with Jan Schmidt in various capacities. It’s impossible, after watching them, to think A Case for a Rookie Hangman was a fluke. Covering similar themes, including mistaken identity and culture shock, there’s always a political way of interpreting his films — which is what made him such a good fit for adapting the third book of Gulliver’s Travels by known satirist, Jonathan Swift — but that doesn’t take away how fantastical they are.
Cars Without A Home (1959) is described as a documentary yet, thanks to the narration (which Juráček wrote), you have cars being personified and the fourth wall being broken when the narrator interrupts the film to stop it from ending.
Josef Kilián (1963) starts off with Jan Herold (Karel Vasicek) trying to find Josef Kilián before renting a cat from a cat rental store. When Herold tries to return the cat, the shop no longer exists. Suddenly Kilián is the guy Herold needs to contact if he wants to avoid late fees but he’s still nowhere to be found, leaving Herold and the cat to make an appearance in A Case for A Rookie Hangman, seven years later.
Black and White Sylva (1961) features a sparkling performance by Zuzanna Stivínová as Sylva, the bricklayer from the musical, Love Amidst the Tower Blocks. During a screening of the film Sylva falls out of the picture and into the theater, where the projector gets turned off before she can try to go back. Determined to find another building site where she can work, Sylva has to contend with the filmmakers, who want to use her for promotion, while a group of intellectuals try to dissect what she is (an idea or a person) while pointing out mannerisms that give her away for being fiction (like the way that she walks).
A Case for A Rookie Hangman tells the story of Lemuel Gulliver (Lubomir Kostelka). Forced to avoid a roadblock, Lemuel ends up getting in a car crash and killing a rabbit, whose pocket watch and fancy dress is reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. After walking and coming across a house, Lemuel enters a world not unlike Lewis Carroll’s. “Synthetic geography” is the term that comes up during The Projection Booth Podcast, where guests Kat Ellinger and Kevin Heffernan talk about the film with host Mike White (usually I’m not a fan when companies put audio over a film that’s not meant to be a commentary because it doesn’t sync up, but in this case it forces you to watch the film without subtitles and there’s a lot you can miss, trying to the read the text). What that “synthetic geography” looks like is an absolute mind trip.
While the house is heavily influenced by Lemuel’s memories (with Lemuel left to question whether he’s dreaming or whether he’s died), the place where he ends up is called Balnibarbi. A suspicious place, the Balnibarbians have a low tolerance for Lemuel not understanding their customs. They clash just as quickly as they forgive, while Miroslav Hájek’s editing creates gaps in the timeline and more questions — transitions like magic tricks that you’ll want to know how he did them.
Fans of TV shows like Life on Mars and more surreal movies should seriously think about moving this film to the top of their to-watch list. A Case for A Rookie Hangman is available on Blu-Ray and DVD from Second Run. Both are region-free.