Chapter 18
Forget Jurassic Park, The Lost World, One Million Years B.C., The Animal World and countless other segments of prehistoric life included in countless other movies. The only picture to really convey to an audience a literal translation of a world that existed millions of years in the distant past is Karel Zeman’s enchanting Cesta do Praveku (Studio Gottwaldow 1954/1955). Variously released under the titles of Journey to a Primeval Age, A Voyage to Prehistory and, in its 1966 Americanized format, Journey to the Beginning of Time, Zeman’s Czechoslovakian fantasy masterpiece remains the director’s crowning triumph, all the more so when one considers that the marvelous effects on display were created some 40 years before the advent of computerized digital imagery.
A keen student of film, Zeman first became interested in the field of special effects in 1943 when he enrolled in Zlin’s animation studios, tutored by Hermina Tyrlova, a pioneer in producing animated shorts. At around this date in his early career, Zeman also became fascinated by the prehistoric world; the paintings of noted Czech artist Zdenek Burian, integrated with the prose of eminent paleontologist Josef Augusta, captivated him, as did the novels of Jules Verne. The combination of Burian and Verne was the catalyst that spurred Zeman into producing a number of full-length fantasy pictures from 1954 onward, mostly based on the writings of Verne, in particular Journey to the Center of the Earth. Burian has the reputation of being one of the three greatest exponents of prehistoric art, bringing to vivid life on canvas Earth’s distant geological ages; American Charles R. Knight and England’s Maurice Wilson are the only two who can equal his work in this field. Burian’s plates, captured in full glory in Prehistoric Animals (Spring Books 1956), show an astonishing eye for detail, both in his interpretations of long-dead animals discovered in the fossil records and the scenery in which they inhabited. His spectacular paintings portraying the jungles of the Carboniferous Age remain unsurpassed, limitless vistas of swamps, forests and exotic plants over which a crimson sky hangs heavy with smoke from volcanic eruptions. It was Burian’s inspirational artwork, above everything else, that drove Zeman and his team of technicians to attempt something similar on celluloid, to recreate to the best of their ability those stunning primeval landscapes, to imbue their production with the crucial age-old atmosphere called for to carry the story. Stop-motion animation, mattes, animatronics, multiple exposures, model work, wildlife footage, split-screen and accurately rendered panoramic glass backdrops were the techniques used, all without the aid of a computer. In a way, it was a milestone in dynamic special effects, mirrored in the making of King Kong 21 years earlier.
The plotline in Cesta do Praveku is slight, but it was meant to be so. Zeman’s intention was to approach his subject matter from a documentary point of view, rather than a plot-driven exercise in boys versus monsters, ultimately becoming a lesson in the evolutionary process. Narrated by Josef Lukas, first introduced poring over a battered journal, a trilobite in his hand, the opening few minutes stress the Verne and Burian influences, as well as showing photographs of fossil dinosaur bones in museums. Next we see Lukas, Vladimir Bejval, Petr Herrmann and Zdenek Hustak rowing a boat through a dark grotto, emerging into a sea of ice. We are now in the Ice Age and straight off, the four boys encounter a trumpeting mammoth on the riverbank, a snow-laden rocky mountain diorama adding to the sensation of brooding emptiness. (“A mammoth. A veritable mammoth. It’s colossal. Quite colossal,” whisper the youngsters, viewing the shaggy elephant through binoculars.) This feeling of emptiness, of silence and of sheer solitude is prevalent throughout the film (E.F. Burian’s score is used sparingly). These amazing creatures existed eons before Man arrived, in an unpopulated world, and this is one of the big success factors in Cesta do Praveku: No roaring, aggressive monsters here (apart from one sequence). These beasts are going about their business regardless, behaving naturally, man not yet figuring in the scheme of things, not for a very long time to come. (In a way, Zeman’s picture predates BBC-TV’s Walking with Dinosaurs [1999], whereby prehistoric life was recreated by computer and casually observed; creatures to study, not to interact with.) The four adventurers discover a cave crammed with bones and early human artifacts, see a tussle between two woolly rhinos and then, from the Ice Age, they make their way down river, drifting through swirling mist into the sub-tropical Tertiary period, the longest and most evocative section of the film. Using stop-motion animation throughout this segment, Zeman brings a whole array of prehistoric wildlife to the screen: pelicans, antelope, elephants (the Deinotherium), the Uintatherium, a saber-toothed tiger, giraffes, horses and gazelles, the humid air filled with the buzzing of insects, a dormant volcano soaring above the horizon. After an angry giant flightless bird, the Phororhacos, pursues Lukas, the explorers pass into the Mesozoic period, coming under attack from a swarm of Pteranodons, glimpsing a Styracosaurus and witnessing a twilight battle to the death between Ceratosaurus and Stegosaurus, all set against an arresting Jurassic backdrop. As well as stop-motion, animatronics breathe life into the Brontosaurus and Trachodon. A full-sized 20-foot model Stegosaurus enables the boys to clamber over its dead body like playful children, taking measurements and photographs.
No fantasy film to date has ever reconstructed the Carboniferous era; here, Zeman has conjured up a vista of lofty trees, thick jungle, massive shrubs and never-ending lagoons, populated by huge dragonflies (Meganeuras) and salamanders (Stegocephalians), a wondrous visualization steeped in primeval ambience in which the young cast are seemingly projected directly into the depths of a Burian masterwork. The adventurers lose their journal, but unruly Bejval, forever wandering off and causing trouble, retrieves it from the jaws of a warty amphibian and the four eventually end their journey down the “river of time” at the dawn of creation, in the Silurian period, on a desolate shoreline where the lowly trilobite is the only living animal around (in actuality, they wouldn’t have been able to breathe Earth’s toxic atmosphere, but that’s beside the point!). There’s no account of how the boys manage to find a way back to their own time — the movie closes after two trilobites are found in the sea.
The original Czech cut of Cesta do Praveku, running at 92 minutes, was rarely seen in England, only screened at festivals and given a solitary showing on the U.K.’s commercial television channel in 1963, appearing as four 23-minute episodes. An 87-minute digitally restored version in pristine monochrome surfaced on a French video release in 1997 (with French subtitles) but is no longer available. Plans to have the full-length original issued on DVD in 2010 were curtailed because of various legalities. What fans of this little-seen fantasy have to make do with at present is the coarsely dubbed Americanized print, concocted in 1966 by William Cayton under the title Journey to the Beginning of Time; the producer wanted to jump onto the One Million Years B.C. bandwagon and capitalize on Hammer’s successful prehistoric saga, so what better way of doing it than to restyle Zeman’s magnum opus, adding new opening and closing scenes, a cast of stand-ins and tinting it in color.
Cayton’s version does nothing to enhance the reputation of Zeman’s original — in fact, it does its level best to sabotage the timeless quality and charm that makes Cesta do Praveku such a rewarding experience. Zeman’s opening six minutes (continuing up to the point where the four boys row out of the cave into the Ice Age) is jettisoned in favor of a new 10-minute sequence showing four American youths crossing New York’s Central Park. Inside the American Museum of Natural History, they peruse the skeletal remains of dinosaurs and inspect a model of a medicine man in an Indian canoe. Back in the park, they take a boat out onto the lake and discover a cave entrance. Rowing into the cave, the film then defaults to Zeman’s original, tinted in ghastly shades of skuzzy color. During this opening 10 minutes, we never get to see the boys’ faces in close-up (they’re filmed from the rear), as to do so would show them to be the impostors they really are; it would be far too evident that what we have here are four Americans taking the place of the four young Czechoslovakian actors.
So basically, the bulk of Journey to the Beginning of Time is Cesta do Praveku with a tagged-on beginning and ending. But much dissimilarity occurs in this tampered with version of the Czech classic. The pages of Josef Lukas’ journal, detailing their journey and the ages they are passing through, have been edited out, as these would betray the movie’s Czech origins. E.F. Burian’s fine orchestral music (missing entirely from the garish credits) is used too much (augmented by a tuneless score added by Cayton), shattering the peace and quiet that highlighted the original. And the exact translation of the delightfully quaint Czech script (by Zeman and J.A. Novotny) has been completely lost, replaced by childish lines such as “Wow! Look at those mountains,” “If that’s an elephant, I’ll eat my beret, pompoms an’ all,” “What an ugly monster. Is he very dangerous?” “Nah! He’s a vegetarian,” and “Why, if I brought a Stegosaurus home, Dad and I could go for long walks after supper with it.” The dubbing is sloppy in the extreme; in numerous scenes, the lads are seen jabbering away while the American dialogue is completely out-of-synch with what they are saying. The dinosaur battle has growls and roars added while three vital minutes from the fantastical Carboniferous sequence are missing (the lads approaching the densely vegetated swamplands on their raft). The ending leaves out the discovery of the trilobites in the ocean; instead, we have footage of an erupting volcano and odd, distorted images representing (one assumes) Earth’s primitive life forms. Then the American actors wake up in the museum; their voyage has been a dream, each one hypnotized by the old shaman in the canoe. And coming in at 83 minutes, the picture is several minutes shorter than both the original and the French re-mastered copy.
Cesta do Praveku, completed in 1954 and screened at film festivals in Europe in 1955, is a haunting, at times poignant, journey into childhood desires, harking back to what most pre-teens at that time would have loved to set out to do, to explore a prehistoric world with all its stupendous sights, the ultimate big adventure. Innocent in many ways when set side-by-side with today’s explicit cinematic and social climate, the overall power of this entrancing movie has not diminished one iota over a period of 50- odd years; we can truly soak up the primeval atmosphere so beautifully rendered by Zeman and his team. And if we must have it in color, someone should give the picture the painstaking care and attention that Ray Harryhausen performed so successfully on 20 Million Miles to Earth; a digitally restored, colorized print of Zeman’s tour de force would be very welcome indeed! [Note: A Czech color print sanctioned by the Karel Zeman Museum has now become available. In 1974, the British Museum of Natural History commissioned Invicta Plastics to produce a series of 1/45 scaled models of various prehistoric life based mainly on the paintings of Zdenek Burian. These realistically sculpted figures, 23 in all, are still the preferred choice of experts and have become collectors’ items.]
As a postscript to this chapter, Zeman’s The Fabulous World of Jules Verne (Vynalez Zkazy; Studio Gottwaldow, 1958) is another fine example of the director’s pictorial genius and obsession both with the classical works of the French author and the pioneering series of fantasy features concocted by visionary filmmaker Georges Mélies between 1896-1913, in particular Under the Seas (1907). Created in MystiMation, this is a remarkable evocation of Verne’s prophecies, utilizing stop-motion animation (a giant squid), glass-painted backdrops, life-sized models, sea life footage, live action, puppetry, multiple exposures and incredibly detailed engravings within its rich fabric. Virtually every frame of film contains some form of trick effect, the entire 83 minutes dazzling the eye with a design uniquely different. Drawing its stimulus from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island, the simplistic plot has Professor Arnost Navratil and pupil Lubor Tokos kidnapped by megalomaniac Miroslav Holub and his pirate gang. Taken by submarine to a vast industrial complex housed within the crater of an extinct volcano, Navratil is ordered to construct a huge bomb packed with a new form of explosive; Holub plans to fire the missile from a massive cannon to demonstrate his intentions of dominating the world. The completed bomb slips from its cradle as warships approach, destroying the island base — Tokos manages to escape in a balloon with winsome Jana Zatloukalova, drifting off romantically toward the rising sun.
In terms of technical virtuosity and ideas, this movie was many years ahead of its time; The Fabulous World of Jules Verne exemplifies the work of one of cinema’s least-known but most imaginative fantasy moviemakers. It’s a must-see purchase for lovers of eccentric cinema.