I know what you did last Prague Spring Czech horror and fantasy at the Museum of Fine Arts BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

In the foreground of a shot of a sunlit field in the Czech surrealist film Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, an oil lamp blazes. A slow rack focus melts the shape of the lamp, turning it into a yellow glow against the landscape.

No one is there to derive any practical benefit from the lamp, even supposing it could add to the light that already pours over everything. The lamp stands for a subjective consciousness that can add nothing to the objective world — nothing except the fading beauty of its wasteful assertion of Self. Perhaps it’s nothing less than a sign of the autonomy of art. A constant pleasure of the varied films in "Czech Horror and Fantasy on Film," a traveling series curated by film scholar Steven Jay Schneider, lies in watching the films assert this autonomy, in defiance not only of bureaucratic censorship but of standard ways of interpreting the relationship between art and the world.

The best film I saw in the series, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (1969; December 20 at 2:30 p.m.) follows the adventures of an adolescent girl who is victimized by her white-faced grandmother, several vampires, and other strange figures who inhabit her 19th-century village. The atmosphere of corruption is offset by the ever-renewable innocence of the heroine, who seems to be watching herself in a play. We view the whole film as if from the point of view of the dreamer awakened. With Valerie, the film visits situations, brushes over them, and never fully inhabits them; yet from this restraint a deeper participation ensues, accompanied by nostalgia and a feeling of pity for the movie’s monsters.

These feelings can no doubt be linked to a certain way of triumphing over the actual political regime under which director Jaromil Jireš and scenarist Ester Krumbachová labored (with the Warsaw Pact repression of Prague Spring fresh in their minds). No interpretive move is easier than this sort of reading, which sees in the fantastic art produced under late-20th-century Communism a sly revenge against the state. Similarly, with Jiří Barta’s The Pied Piper (1986; December 11 at 2 p.m. and December 14 at 12:30 p.m.), it requires no great leap of imagination to take the ostensibly bourgeois society presented at the outset of the film as a corrupt Communist society.

It’s easy to speculate on the meanings that artistic forms of fantasy had for people who knew they were living under a political system and a mass media based on denying reality and disseminating lies. It’s also easy to imagine the associations that artistic forms of horror might have had for people who had recently endured Nazi terror and the Second World War. But the very ease with which these ideas can be imagined and demonstrated is the biggest problem Westerners have in confronting Eastern European film. To reduce cultural objects to their possible social and political meanings, or even their likely ones, is always a mistake. The more seemingly transparent these meanings, the better the chances that the viewer will make that mistake.

I don’t mean to universalize the films in this series either, since that would be another way of flattening them. And one can’t ignore the real difficulties filmmakers faced in dealing with the heavily bureaucratized Czechoslovak film industry, especially after 1968, or the circumlocutions, compromises, and ironies that are the traces these difficulties left. But what’s apparent from the evidence of this series is that rather than representing a single tradition, a simple (or complex) code, or a set of devices and conventions, horror meant different things for different artists.

Banned for almost two decades, probably because of its scathing depiction of sinister Czech bureaucrats and their condescending Russian patrons, Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear (1970; December 21 at 4:10 p.m.) has been compared with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but it can also be described as both Czechoslovakia’s Faces and its Night of the Living Dead. A Communist Party official and his wife return from a Party social function. The husband has received the troubling news that a colleague has been quietly arrested; he fears he may be the next target. The married couple, who treat each other with casual hostility, review the evening’s events and consider their implications while worrying that everything they say could be getting picked up by bugging devices that may or may not have been planted in their home. Meanwhile, Party men gather ominously in front of their house, as if preparing to force their way in.

From its opening, as the squabbling couple return home to find that they’ve misplaced their keys and are reduced to breaking into their own house, The Ear is a portrayal of everyday life made strange and turned inside-out. The horror of The Ear lies in its detailing of the failure of all institutions and relationships and in its evocation of a sense of universal betrayal.

In The Pied Piper, animator Jiří Barta adapts the well-known Hamelin legend into an attack on a society devoted to accumulation, with the rats appearing as members of a rampaging underclass who, once they’re in power, prove no better than their betters, and with the pied piper as an implacable Death figure. Barta’s incredibly elaborate miniature sets, his grotesque puppets, and his use of live rats and other varied materials will appeal to admirers of his better-known compatriot Jan Svankmajer. (A program of short films by Barta, Svankmajer, and Václav Mergl will screen on December 21 at 2:20 p.m.)

The hero of Zbynĕk Brynych’s The Fifth Horseman Is Fear (1964; December 20 at 4 p.m.), which is set in a city under occupation, is a Jewish doctor who moonlights at a warehouse for the confiscated property of deported Jews. After letting himself be persuaded to remove a bullet from a Resistance fighter, the doctor goes in search of morphine for his patient. The occupying forces are, it’s clear, Nazis, and the occupied city is plausibly Prague, but Brynych leaves the political and historical context of the story indeterminate, focusing on the doctor’s internal struggles and on the moral ambiguity of all the characters around him. The Resistance isn’t seen as heroic and in a sense isn’t seen at all: the wounded fighter’s colleague seems mainly absorbed in his relationship with his vain wife. Brynych uses the film’s widescreen space in interesting ways: sometimes a single small object grabs all interest (a clock hanging on an otherwise empty wall, an old man’s face peering out the window of a building), and the montage and the narration deal in disconnection.

The wacky fantasy comedy Who Killed Jessie? (1966; December 11 at 3:30 p.m.) is the missing link between Eastern European science fiction and Richard Quine’s How To Murder Your Wife, even though director Václav Vorlíček may have thought he was being Buñuelian (just as Brynych sometimes suggests a grimmer Fellini). A scientist invents a serum that can remove undesirable images from dreams; unfortunately, it has the side effect of causing the images to take real-world form, so that when the scientist administers it to her husband, the trio of comic-book characters he’s been fantasizing about show up in their apartment and are soon running amok in Prague. Some bits are almost worthy of Frank Tashlin. The intruders talk in three-dimensional cartoon-dialogue bubbles, one of which has to be turned around so that someone can read it. And when a neighbor telephones to complain about the noise, a superhero-costumed strong man tugs on the phone cord, pulling the neighbor (at the other end of the line) through the wall into the apartment.

Based on a story by Russian writer Aleksandr Grin, Juraj Herz’s Morgiana (1971; December 13 at 3:45 p.m.) is a delirious Gothic art object about the rivalry between two sisters, one bad, one good, both dressed to the nines in a variety of outlandish Victorian costumes and made up to look like dolls (they also have dolls in each other’s likeness), and both played by the same actress (Iva Janžurová). The bad sister (whose misdeeds are frequently seen in wide-angle, close-to-the-floor shots representing the point of view of her cat) slow-poisons the good one, a process that subjects the victim to a lingering illness, prismatic hallucinations, and reddish image suffusions out of Hitchcock’s Marnie. Herz, it’s clear, isn’t taking the story seriously, but neither is he exactly making fun of it: the strident, portentous music and Janžurová’s tour-de-force performance, combined with the costume-party-on-acid visuals, produce a weirdly decadent effect overlaid on the somber but reassuringly traditional narrative.