Screened as part of the Apostrophe Sioxante Huit Project, Milos Forman’s groundbreaking early career highlight, The Firemen’s Ball tells the story of the eponymous annual event in the firefighters calendar. Based on real events witnessed by Forman, the film is presumed to be a political allegory, yet Forman attests these charges. As a result the film was “banned forever” in his native Czechoslovakia. 

The film is made up of several interconnecting anecdotes over a slim running time of 72 minutes. This brief running time and situation-based nature of the comedy reminds of a traditional television sitcom at times, yet the beautiful photography helps a great deal to seperate the film from such fare. The comedy is laugh out loud funny, despite the age that has passed since production and is definately not lost in translation.

Its obvious at times why people mistakenly believed that The Firemen’s Ball did indeed contain a political message, as some of the humour could easily be interpretted in that manner. For example the way that the spectatorial attitude of the masses gathered outside of the burning house is presented is highly cynical, and could be seen as an approach to tackling the contextual political situation in Czechoslovakia in 1967. Further to this, the way in which the gathered masses applaud themselves upon being thanked for giving the man raffle tickets for the practically non-existent tombola also felt satirical in tone. As a result I’m not sure whether or not I believe Forman when he claims that the film contains “hidden symbols or double meanings”.