The Shop on the Main Street

Winner of the 1966 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and presented as part of LIFF 2021’s Kafkaesque Cinema selection, The Shop on the Main Street is a World War Two drama with both a supreme lightness of touch and highly impactful emotional heft. Tono is a Slovak carpenter appointed, as a bullying tactic by his brother-in-law, as the ‘Aryan controller’ of an elderly Jewish widow’s button shop. Not realising the true nature of his appointment, Tono forms an affectionate bond with its proprietor Ida. Naivite and wilful denial help reinforce their insular reality, as the Nazi threat draws ever closer.

The Shop on Main Street explicitly conforms to the codes of farcical comedy and its humour is Kafkaesque. Kafkaesque humour produces a bitter type of amusement that can be seen as part of a gallows comic style. Miloš Forman, the Czechoslovak New Wave director, has captured this brilliantly: ‘The tradition of Czech culture is always humor based on serious things, like The Good Soldier Svejk. Kafka is a humorous author, but a bitter humourist. It is in the Czech people. You know, to laugh at its own tragedy has been in this century the only way for such a little nation placed in such a dangerous spot in Europe to survive. So humor was always the source of a certain self-defense. If you don’t know how to laugh, the only solution is to commit suicide.’