Oscar-winning Czech director best known for his 1966 film Closely Observed Trains
The film Closely Observed Trains, made in 1966, is a quietly subversive
comedy, beautifully shot in crisp black-and-white, in which a workshy young guard at a remote train station in Czechoslovakia during the second world war is more concerned with losing his virginity than with throwing in his lot with either the occupying German forces or the resistance fighters.
It was directed with a charmingly light touch by Jiří Menzel, who has died aged 82 after a long illness. It established the simple rural milieu to which he would return repeatedly throughout his career and showed in its gently searching way that the personal can never be divorced from the political.