Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho has pointed to Karel Kachyňa’s The Ear as one of the films that helped shape The Secret Agent, his Oscar-nominated political thriller now playing in Prague. Earlier this year, New York’s Film at Lincoln Center included the restored Czech classic in a program of titles selected by Mendonça to illuminate the influences behind his latest feature.
That choice places a 1970 Czechoslovak film, long recognized as one of the sharpest cinematic portraits of surveillance and political fear, in direct conversation with one of the most acclaimed international releases of the current awards season.
As The Prague Reporter wrote in its review of The Secret Agent, the film “fuses historical political turmoil, local urban legends, and callbacks to classic 1970s cinema into a taut, visually arresting paranoia thriller.” Mendonça Filho’s acknowledgment of The Ear helps identify one important strand of that cinematic lineage.
A Czech classic in a network of influences
Film at Lincoln Center’s January series, titled The Secret Agent Network, gathered nine films chosen by Mendonça as touchstones for The Secret Agent. The selections ranged widely across countries, genres, and tones, but they were linked by shared concerns: hidden authority, institutional violence, paranoia, and the ways political systems shape private life. Among Brazilian landmarks, Hollywood studio filmmaking, and European political cinema, The Ear stood out as one of the most striking entries.
Directed by Karel Kachyňa and completed in 1970, The Ear follows a government official and his wife (played by Radoslav Brzobohatý and Jiřina Bohdalová) over the course of one increasingly terrifying night after they return home to discover signs that they may be under surveillance. Their electricity has been cut, their home no longer feels secure, and every conversation carries the possibility that the state is listening. What unfolds is less a conventional thriller than an anatomy of dread, in which suspicion and political vulnerability seep into the domestic sphere.
That premise aligns closely with key tensions in The Secret Agent, which is set in 1970s Brazil during the military dictatorship. Mendonça’s film follows Armando Solimões, played by Wagner Moura, a former researcher forced into hiding while being pursued by corrupt officials and hired killers. While the Brazilian film operates on a broader canvas than The Ear, moving through urban spaces, family networks, folklore, and fragmented timelines, both films are rooted in the psychological effects of authoritarianism.
The inclusion of The Ear in the New York series also highlighted the continuing international afterlife of the Czech film. Banned after its completion and unseen publicly until 1990, it has long been regarded as one of the defining works to emerge from the political and artistic fallout of the Prague Spring. Its 2022 restoration has introduced it to new audiences abroad, including through the U.S. premiere screening in New York earlier this year.
For Czech cinema, Mendonça’s public embrace of The Ear is a reminder of how deeply films from the Czechoslovak New Wave and its surrounding period continue to resonate far beyond their original historical context.
Paranoia from Prague to Recife
The connection between The Ear and The Secret Agent is not simply one of plot or mood. It is also about method. Both films turn political repression into something experiential, allowing viewers to feel how surveillance alters behavior, speech, and even the texture of ordinary interactions. In The Ear, that pressure is compressed into a single night and a single household. In The Secret Agent, it spreads outward into a larger social landscape marked by corruption, fear, and unresolved violence.
Mendonça’s film is filled with explicit and implicit references to 1970s cinema. But The Ear offers a particularly revealing comparison because it brings the story’s political unease into the most intimate possible setting. Rather than spectacle, both films often rely on anxiety, overheard fragments, and the uncertainty of who is watching.
That sensibility appears throughout The Secret Agent, even as the Brazilian film expands into stranger and more associative territory. Mendonça blends documented history with local myth, including Recife’s “hairy leg” urban legend, and fills the film with narrative detours, genre echoes, and dark humor. Yet beneath those flourishes is the same recognition that authoritarian systems do not only imprison or kill; they also corrode trust, warp perception, and turn daily life into a field of menace.
Despite being hidden for two decades, The Ear is not an obscure cinephile reference but a major Czech work, shaped by its own country’s experience of censorship and state intrusion in late 1960s Czechoslovakia. Its presence inside the creative DNA of The Secret Agent creates a dialogue between two films made more than 50 years apart, in different continents and political histories, yet preoccupied with similar questions about power and fear.
