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Oil Lamps
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - United Kingdom - Second Run Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (4th June 2025). |
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The Film
 The dawn of the twentieth century brings the promise of a new world to almost everyone in Bohemian bourgeoise society except Stepa Killanova (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen's Iva Janzurová). A beautiful free spirit popular in the theatrical society and always au courant with her Viennese hats, she is also thirty years of age and unmarried with her prospects dwindling. Her mother (Tomorrow I'll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea's Marie Rosulková) disapproves of her preferred suitor in a schoolteacher Paulik "poor as a church mouse" while her father (The Liberation of Prague's Ota Sklencka) disapproves of middle-aged tax clerk Groman (How About a Plate of Spinach?'s Stanislav Remunda) who believes her "shameless and brazen" and demands that she be more penitent (to him) than remains true to herself. Both parents disapprove of her lifelong infatuation with cousin Pawel (Valley of the Bees' Petr Cepek), the dashing younger son of her mother's brother ('s Karel Cernoch). Although once promising when Stepa's father got him into the Austrian Army, he is now a burn-out who drinks, carouses, and has mounting gambling debts for which his father foots the bill and who is resented by his older brother Jan (Shadows of a Hot Summer's Karel Chromík) who is trying to keep the family farm afloat but is no real prospect himself as much because of their financial situation as his own disagreeable nature. Visiting home without plans to return to the army, Pawel has given Stepa the cold shoulder; that is, until he and Jan argue over who will be master of the farm: Jan who plans to take Manka (Sweet Games of Last Summer's Jana Plichtová), the simple-minded daughter of a late family retainer, or Pawel who has squandered his half of the family fortune while his father is still breathing but makes the bold promise of saving the farm with a wealthy bride's dowry. Stepa is charmed but naturally suspicious when Pawel asks for her hand, but she hopes that their union will be more than one of convenience where she can continue to do as she pleases as can he. Her parents reluctantly consent to the marriage so long as she maintains the purse strings on her inheritance. Stepa soon learns that Pawel possesses little genuine affection for anyone and no interest in farming, even after she purchases the neighboring woodland so he can indulge in his passion for shooting. With Jan sticking to his half of the farm and unwilling to even be paid by her to co-manage the farm as a whole, Stepa decides to educate herself in farming but she still wants to be loved by Pawel and bear his children but he reveals that he cannot have children and lied because she would not have married him otherwise. As Pawel's health declines along with his mind, Stepa learns that she has been naive in believing Pawel simply suffers from rheumatism but what housemaid Karla (The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians' Evelyna Steimarová) calls "love sickness," whereupon Stepa becomes a prisoner stigmatized by her society's old world values. Made in between Czech director Juraj Herz's more expressionistic The Cremator and Gothic Morgiana, Oil Lamps (Petrolejové lampy) is just as literary – based on a novel by (Uncle Cyril) but more naturalistic in style and, perhaps because of its overall prettified Fin de Siècle aesthetic, its social commentary seems more overt. With its contrast between the optimism of the new age that looks forward to their descendant eclipsing them in culture and industry and the oppressive shadow of the old world, the film's venal deception of an "heiress" into a bad marriage through a romantic lure brings to mind Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady" as Stepa surrenders to the idea that it is "better to be a widow than an old maid." Her father seems to grudgingly consent because his daughter is in love while her mother seems overcome by nostalgia of her nephew's past promise and the belief that Stepa can change him while her cousin/brother-in-law Jan only cares that they do not lose the farm and his and Pawel's father seems passive and detached but his will overshadows the relationship between the brothers to the point where however at odds the three of them are they are actually complicit in manipulating Stepa. Even in the end where she asserts her own will, there is one final cruel irony of which she may never discover. Like Herz's other films, Oil Lamps is gorgeously and meticulously-designed from the costumes and production design to the photography of Dodo Simoncic and the scoring of Lubos Fiser (Valerie and Her Week of Wonders) whose orchestral accompaniment seems at first just blandly pretty but gains emotional resonance as the contrasts between Stepa's hopes and her reality – and, indeed, those of the age – become more apparent. 
Video
Distributed stateside by Filmaco four years after its Czech release, Oil Lamps comes to Second Run in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 pillarboxed fullscreen transfer derived from a recent 4K restoration of the original 35mm camera and sound negatives and looks spotless compared to some of the Czech National Film Archive restorations that preserve defects organic to the original processing and projection – perhaps because the restoration was sponsored by another entity with the materials only supplied by the archive – from the art nouveau titles to close-ups which carefully delineate the pallor of the characters, Stepa without her make-up and stressed and Pawel looking increasingly sickly. 
Audio
The sole audio option is a Czech LCPM 2.0 mono track crisply delivers the post-dubbed dialogue and Fiser's rich score along with some gunfire (the score does most of the heavy lifting rather than the sound design). Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors, translating the Czech song lyrics in the opening while leaving some quoted German untranslated. 
Extras
An alternate audio track features the 2021 "Czech-tember" Projection Booth Podcast with film historians Mike White, Kat Ellinger, and Jonathan Owen in which they discuss how the film differs stylistically from the other better-known Herz films but has some thematic and aesthetic ideas in common with Herz's television film Sweet Games of Last Summer. They also discuss the film in contrast to his earlier works and how the Soviet crackdown derailed many of his planned projects while also noting that he was still able to invest "second choice" projects and films like Morgiana (which he regarded as more of an opportunity for experimentation) with his own themes and interests within the restrictions of popular genre trends. The discussion also indirectly includes the question of how much the viewer may understand based on their familiarity with the period and perhaps Czech culture with regard to beautiful, vivacious Stepa's unpopularity and whether it is putting on airs or that she is at thirty an "old maid" and the depiction of Pawel's disease and its progression with regard to other revelations throughout the film. "A Conversation on a Train (Rozhovor ve vlaku)" (13:00) is a 1947 short film addressing the issues of alcoholism and sexually-transmitted diseases sponsored by the Czech ministry of Health. The disc also includes a theatrical trailer (1:55) created for the restoration. 
Packaging
The disc is housed with a booklet with new writing on the film by author and Czech cinema expert Peter Hames who discusses Herz's early career in puppetry – including working with Jan Svankmajer – his assistant director credits, how his segment of Pearls of the Deep ended up being released separately while his subsequent films ended up being denounced by the Party, and his plans to adapt more works by Ladislav Fuks after The Cremator. Of Oil Lamps, Hames suggests that despite the source novel's "predilection for decadent themes" counter to the Socialist Realism, they could be interpreted as a criticism of capitalist society in which "financial and property considerations determine human relations" and describes how Herz's approach is anything but a "realist" treatment.
Overall
Juraj Herz's Oil Lamps is less Expressionistic than his The Cremator and less Gothic than Morgiana making more apparent the moral decay underneath its gilded façade.
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