Against aggressive Hollywood shills and the inexorable stand U.S. trade officials have taken to force Europe to lower barriers and swallow even more American "entertainment," it's heartening to see that the Czech film industry is not only holding its own, but occasionally succeeding. A few weeks ago, four of the five top grossing films in the country were Czech, with the comedy Doblba! having passed the attendance mark of 200,000 people since its release in late September.

Two smaller Czech films have opened in the last few weeks that are deserving of attention. The first, Restart, is the graduate project of a FAMU directing student that is getting multiplex showings. The second, Toyen, by famed director Jan Němec, has quietly slipped into arthouse cinemas.

Restart, which will be shown with English subtitles at Světozor, is a very confident bit of filmmaking from Julius Ševčík. His name is worth putting to memory if this, his first feature film, is anything to go by.

Restart's plot is simple: The day after a night of intense clubbing, Sylva (Lenka Krobotová) says something unforgivable to her lover Martin (Filip Čapka) on the phone. After Martin hangs up on her she realizes her blunder, and the rest of the film details her frantic hunt for Martin to make amends before he disappears from her life completely.

Filmed throughout Prague, Sylva's search takes her from the spent furnace of a closing nightclub to the stark sterility of fast-food joints. Driven by a building fear that Martin is lost to her, Sylva's brain sputters with raw, increasingly paranoiac scenarios of what's happened to him. Ševčík presents this engrossing torment to us from Sylva's perspective, reminding us of William James' maxim that "The mind is at every stage a theater of simultaneous possibilities." Lines begin to blur between what is real and what has boiled over from Sylva's febrile imagination.

Technically, Ševčík's direction, besides the de rigueur Dogme nod to use a handheld camera, is vigorous, and his mise-en-scene perfectly captures the carpe noctem of club life as well as the attending shocks of cold day. The actors, particularly Krobotová, are strong, which makes Restart a good contender for appearing in a future top-five list.

Němec's film is much quieter, and even though it is in Czech, image takes precedence over language. In fact, there is no dialogue as such in Toyen. Instead, it's driven by the words of the artist herself, as well as by poetry from Jindřich Heisler and Jaroslav Seifert, who possibly gave Marie Cerminová the single name by which she's known: Toyen.

Toyen's life and art are well worth discovering, and an understanding of both will aid in the enjoyment of these filmed fragments of an existence. Like Leonor Fini and Meret Oppenheim, the Czech Toyen was that rare creature, a female Surrealist. In what was predominantly an overtly masculine group (if not gang), Toyen held her own, even receiving (along with her Mexican contemporary Frida Kahlo) the blessing of Surrealism's pope, André Breton.

Toyen is an important figure in Czech culture. An artist within the formidable Devětsil Group, she later co-founded the Czech Surrealist movement with artist Jindřich Štýrský, who became her lover. After his untimely death, Toyen became connected with Heisler, whom she hid in her bathroom for the duration of the Nazi occupation. After the communist takeover, the pair moved to their spiritual homeland, Paris, where Heisler, too, died prematurely, and Toyen struggled on until her own death in 1980.

All of this is woven into Němec's film, though not always satisfactorily. At its best, Toyen is a striking example of collage as biography. Němec often superimposes Toyen's art over the action of her life, creating an exciting pentimento-like seepage. Němec also utilizes old newsreels of the occupation effectively. As with the recent Polish film My Nikifor, Toyen ends with a cinematic gallery tour of the subject's work.