Female Martyrdom and Sexual Sacrifice in Jiří Menzel’s 1966 Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal

[T]o Jiří Menzel, the martyrdom of eroticized women in the process of male maturation is implicit, informed by national preoccupations and social orders. It is through this initial self-effacing sacrifice that these men are then able to become wasted martyrs themselves, bodies on bodies in a heap at the end of the Czechoslovakian New Wave.