Czechoslovak film industry

The project of this dissertation is to investigate the way in which Czech animator Jan Švankmajer gives expression to the inner-life of 'objects' and 'things' in his film-work of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s; although work from outside of this period will help contextualise the discussion. Through this enquiry we will establish the difference between what we might regard as an 'object' and what we might regard as a 'thing' within his work and question whether their animation expresses a response to the Czech political situation at the end of the Cold War. This practice of 'letting objects speak' will be understood within the terms of the surrealist movement (both in its French and its specifically Czech incarnations), universal animism, and Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection. My framework for this investigation will be 'thing theory', with particular consideration paid to the work of Bill Brown, due to the special attention afforded to objects within Švankmajer's films.

This essay explores the inner workings and power dynamics involved in story development in the history of Czech cinema. It focuses on the political history of screenplay development practices and formats, especially on the “Literary Screenplay”. This Soviet-inspired screenplay type was introduced to Eastern Europe in the late-Stalinist era to attract literary authors to write for the screen, to elevate the cultural status of the screenplay, and to facilitate pre-censorship. The primary means by which communist ideologues sought to reform screenwriting was the dramaturgy, organized in a complex hierarchy of dramaturgical institutions with the state or central dramaturgy at the top and “units” at the bottom. In the state-controlled system of production, the dramaturg or unit head supervising four dramaturgs was a close equivalent to a producer albeit without the usual financial, green-lighting, and marketing responsibilities, which were held by the state or by the Party and its representatives. The units oversaw story development, the selection of casts and crews, and, in some historical periods, shooting and post-production, and occasionally even distribution. This essay shows how uncovering the logics of institutionalized practices of collaborative creative work that took place under the influence of political forces can help us to make sense of the vast screenplay collections housed at Prague archives. The essay combines production studies and political history of the production system to reveal the differences between the production modes and the screenwriting practices of Hollywood and Europe, and between the Western and the Eastern halves of this continent. It is based on an analysis of 100 Czech screenplays from the 1920s to the1980s, and of records of their development, as well as on oral history and institutional history.

This chapter aims to offer a model with which to compare the historical character of the various nationalized cinemas of East-Central Europe. The example of Barrandov Studios in the Czech capital of Prague provides my case study. The chapter pays particular attention to the manner in which day-to-day creative activities were managed within a system that designated the state the sole official producer, and to organizational solutions that were introduced in an effort to strike a balance between centralized control and creative freedom. I also focus on the ways in which such a mode of production operated within the historical realities of this production community, and on how its activities responded to institutional interests. I begin by sketching what I call the “state-socialist mode of film production”--which comprises management hierarchies, the division of labor, and work practices--through the example of Czechoslovak cinema from 1945 to 1990, and the systemic variations that it exhibited to other film industries in the region. There follows a description of “dramaturgy”: a system of screenplay development and creative supervision that was typical of both the Czech and East German production systems, and which serves to highlight the revisionist dimensions of my model. A further three sections reveal some important aspects of the “production culture,” which is to say a set of lived realities as they were experienced by workers throughout the professional hierarchy. The combination of these two approaches--one organizational in perspective (top-down), the other cultural (bottom-up)--enables us to read official production documents against the grain and to show that they offer limited accounts of what actually took place. Consequently, this chapter is able to shed new light on how production communities “internalized and acted upon” regulatory environments and institutional interests.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which foreign sound films were distributed, shown and received in Prague between 1929 and 1939. Comparing the popularity of Czechoslovak, American and German productions on the local market, it presents a list of each year’s top-ten hits, and draws conclusions about the short- and longerterm tendencies of local cinemagoing preferences. The chapter asks why the English language and American culture were considered to be disturbing elements by local audiences. What made German films not only more popular than American ones, but also more popular than German versions of American films? Was it the German language, which was more comprehensible to the local public than English, or the archetypes of German-Austrian popular culture represented in these films? How can we explain the extreme but short-term popularity of American talkies in the first year that they were shown in Prague, and their sharp decline in popularity in the following years? What kind of American films continued to be hits after 1930?

Methodologically, this essay is inspired by Janet Staiger’s conceptualization of the Hollywood Mode of Production, while also building on my own work on the ‘State-socialist Mode of Production’, which is to say the management system and division of labor utilized in Czechoslovakia and the other former socialist countries of East-Central Europe. This industrial perspective is combined with a critical cultural analysis inspired by anthropologically-based studies of film ‘production cultures’ (John T. Caldwell) and communities that utilizes diverse informal sources, such as oral history and (auto)biographies. It looks at how the top-down political and cultural reforms of the Czech film production system between 1948 and 1962 interfered with production routines and hierarchies of the local production culture, i.e. the lived realities of the professional communities. Two examples of failed top-down reorganizations that affected daily production routines are used as symptomatic cases, the first one ‘spatial’, the second one ‘temporal’: first, an experiment that attempted to change the Barrandov studios into an industrial factory integrating all production personnel in one place; and second, a project to forge a new generation of communist, or ‘proletarian’ filmmakers to replace the old ‘veterans’, who were supposedly corrupted by bourgeois ideology of the ‘immoral’ film world. The failures of the top-down reorganizations were due to the passive resistance of the filmmaking community. Both conflicts pushed the community to explicitly articulate its values of professionalism and creative labour (e.g., the so-called filmic qualities and dramatic structure of the script versus dogmatic directives of the socialist realism) in order to differentiate themselves from the young radicals and ‘dilettantes’.
This way, the chapter also raises a question of to what extent did these reforms come under the category of so-called Sovietization, or, whether they should be rather termed “self-Sovietization”, resulting in peculiar hybrids of adapted Soviet models with older domestic and German patterns.

The state-socialist mode of film production was in fact a peculiar hybrid of local, regional and global models: it was prepared by the Nazi cultural politics (the idea of centralized "dramaturgy" which enabled ideological control) and Aryanization (which made the post-war nationalization easier). After 1945 and later, after 1948 (when Communists took power in Czechoslovakia), it further developed according to local (Bata shoe factory, inspired by American scientific management) and global (Soviet system, silently inspired by Hollywood vertically integrated studios) models. These three levels of organizational tradition - both in terms of production mode and work culture - persisted as mutually interacting ingredients of the state monopoly until the late 1980s and even on. The aim of the paper is to articulate a comparative model for historical analysis of nationalized cinemas in the region, using the Barrandov studios in Prague as an example. The key question it asks is: how was creativity and day-to-day production of films tactically managed in a system where the only real producer was the state? What organizational instruments had to be developed to balance the centralized control with necessary creative freedom?

"This article examines the re-evaluation and release/re-release during the 1980s of those Czechoslovak films of the 1960s that had, for political and ideological reasons, been banned during the period of so-called normalization – “vault films” as they are often called. It outlines the ways in which the banned films tended to be re-evaluated with the view to release/re-release them, placing particular focus on the period 1988-1989, on the initiatives of the Syndicate of the Czech Drama Artists (Svaz českých dramatických umělců, SČDU), and on the role of the special reviewing committee, that, during the spring of 1989, examined twenty-one banned films, including the highly “controversial” productions LARKS ON THE STRING (1969), ALL MY GOOD COUNTRYMEN (1968), and THE EAR (1969). The outcome of the committee was a report that recommended that all of the films be released either theatrically or through other distribution channels. This decision had been preceded by several attempts to reconsider the status of the banned films. The release of banned films had first been proposed in 1981 by the Central Film Rental Agency (Ústřední půjčovna filmů, ÚPF), as a way of alleviating, for the exhibition sector, a shortage of films. However, this attempt, was by no means a part of the Communist government’s broader cultural policy, and therefore ended abruptly. A more systematic attempt came two years later. After having screened almost fifty films over a two-year period, one of the SČDU’s committees upheld the verdict that had previously condemned the films as anti-socialist. Instead of re-evaluating the films in any meaningful way, the committee had dismissed the cinematic output of the 1960s as a relic of the past that was of little interest and little relevance to the committee or to Czechoslovak society. The article shows that this negative stance towards the banned films continued to characterize the position of the SČDU and the Czechoslovak Communist Party even after the appointment in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev to the position of the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, an event that initiated political and cultural reforms in the Soviet Union. The Czechoslovak Communist Party was highly reticent to embrace changes that were taking place in the USSR and began to adjust its position only after the accelerated transformation of the Soviet Union and other satellite countries had exposed the extreme and unsustainable conservativism of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. The January 1989 demonstrations in Czechoslovakia, which ushered in a year of social and cultural unrest and change, marked a watershed moment with respect to the re-evaluation of the vault films by accelerating plans to reassess this “controversial” body of work and by re-positioning questions about the film heritage of the 1960s to the centre of debates about the transformation of Czechoslovak society.
The re-evaluation of the vault films from the 1960s was, as the article reveals, a high-profile cultural cause celebre during the transformation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1980s. Political and cultural tensions as well as tensions within the individual organizations that participated in the process of re-evaluating the banned films – the SČDU, the Czechoslovak State Film, ÚPF, and the Cultural Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party – converged around the issue of banned films as the diverse cultural, ideological, political, and economical agenda of those organizations clashed and competed with one another. The conflict between pro-reform and anti-reform forces, at a point in time at which the consequences of ongoing political, social, and cultural shifts still remained unclear, erupted visibly with respect to the vault films’ status as prominent cultural products. Moreover, for the SČDU, the issue of the banned films also provided a platform upon which the organization could re-define its stance, articulate its progressive politics, and showcase its internal transformation.
The re-evaluation of the vault films is thus not only an important part of the history of Czechoslovak cinema and of the institutional history of Czechoslovak cultural organizations, but is a key component of the cultural and political history of Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, and both a symptom, and a reflection, of the socio-political changes that were sweeping the country."

"This essay examines the role that American independent distributors and the concept of “independence” played in strategies of Hollywood studios (represented by the Motion Picture Export Association, MPEA) and those of the Czechoslovak state-controlled film industry in their battle to take control of the Czechoslovak film market in the early years of the Cold War. It argues that American independent distributors became a discursive battleground for the MPEA and the Czechoslovak Film Monopoly. The essay combines analysis of primary documents housed in Czech and US archives and of Czechoslovak and American trade and popular press coverage to reveal that discourses of “independence” were mobilized rhetorically by the two organizations in an effort to protect their respective economic and political interests. The Monopoly, along with the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information and the MPEA linked notions of independence to communism and anti-capitalism, but in quite different ways. This essay thus reveals the extent to which notions of independence are deployed as part of political strategy, in addition to their oft-discussed commercial and cultural functions as markers of institutional, aesthetic, and thematic distinction from an imagined Hollywood mainstream.
The essay also expands our understanding of the relations between the majors and independents after WWII. It demonstrates that when it came to Hollywood’s attempts to overwhelm its competitors, political rhetoric was used to complement the economic power examined by Staiger and others. Discrediting independent distributors was bound up with Hollywood’s broader efforts to maintain control over the domestic film market and to dominate markets in Eastern Europe."

The topic of the article is the development of so-called technical screenplays in Czechoslovakia between 1945 and 1954. Using statistical analyses of technical screenplays, we have been able to investigate the development of this type of document. USSR production norms were imported to Czechoslovakia after 1946. This fact affected, amongst other things, the practice of technical screenplays. Technical screenplays in this era became more closed off to dramaturgical modifications and also the form of technical screenplays changed. Although technical screenplays in Czechoslovakia were under the influence of USSR norms, they nevertheless preserved elements derived from the tradition of Czechoslovak screenwriting.

Between 1928 and 1931 the European and the US film industries tried out different strategies for adapting their sound films to markets in other countries. Regardless of their relative success, these strategies included: part-talkies, remakes of successful silent films, synopses of plot printed on cards and handed out to audiences in movie theatres, live commentators accompanying films, side-titles projected on a separate screen from slides, intertitles, superimposed titles, multiple-language versions, and different methods of dubbing or partial dubbing.' Thanks to a wide range of transformations and hybridizations brought on by the new technology of synchronized sound, the film commodity soon had at its disposal a range of variations unknown to it since its early years and the domain of exhibition gained, once again, a much stronger influence. At the same time, however, this tendency toward a greater variability was counterbalanced by a tendency toward standardization: film could no longer be accompanied by live spoken word and music to the same extent as before, and the speed of its projection could no longer be altered.
This tension between the tendency toward variability and the opposing tendency toward standardization is also apparent in "multiple-language versions" (MLVs). On the one hand, the MLVs had to devise a common denominator to link up different textual variants and to minimize economic expenses through the highest possible degree of repetitiveness in the sphere of their production. On the other hand, in order to meet the expectations of different national audiences, the particular variants required differentiation with regard to the fictional time-space (which we will later refer to as "diegesis") of the subject matter and with regard to the elements of production.
In the Czechoslovak production practice ofthe 1930s, foreign-language and the Czech versions were usually shot in parallel, i.e. on the same sets and with the same costumes, and often by same director. Due to restricted resources and the fast pace of shooting, no sophisticated attempts were introduced to adapt either the scenes, the costumes, the plot, social mannerisms, historic and geographic realities or political connotations to any preferences of the target audience. Following the logic of economy, any efforts to modify the film's diegetic space with regard to changes in the language were mostly very straightforward, not to say primitive. For the MLVs export it was necessary to combine maximum common denominator which would guarantee its economy with a minimum of variation which would afford an undisturbed viewing on the part of the foreign spectators. This paper will outline four basic strategies of how this economic logic affected the relationships between the textual variants in terms of diegetic time-space.

This paper explores the ways in which US marketers and distributors repackaged selected Czechoslovak science-fiction and fantasy movies upon their release in the 1950s and 1960s Cold War US market. By a way of comparison with the original marketing of the same movies in Czechoslovakia, it identifies some of the main strategies that marketers employed in order to sell politically and ideologically potentially controversial cultural product.

An essay outlines the life and work of one of the few successful female film practitioners in the early years of the Czechoslovak Cinema - film director and scriptwriter Thea Červenková. It opens up still under explored area of female film pioneers in Czechoslovakia, their position and role within the film industry.

VYHNANICE AND ITS ROLE IN THE BEGINNINGS OF COLLECTIVISATION

In 1952, the directing team of Karel
Kachyňa and Vojtěch Jasný made the
feature-length film Neobyčejná léta
(Extraordinary Years), which focused
on the creation and development of
the Integrated Agricultural Cooperative
(JZD) in Vyhnanice, south Bohemia.
The picture became a model of
the use of propaganda on the road to
collectivising agriculture. The question
is how the small community
found itself in the view finders of the
young directors, how it got onto the
big screen. This study examines the
municipality in the normalisation era,
outlining the fates of its inhabitants
and the brutal change of its ownership
and social structures in the 1950s.

"Abstract: To parody means to transgress, to validate by means of negation, to destroy by creating and to create by destroying. It’s an act of Mephistophelian resemantization, which does not destroy nor annul, but rather absorb the absolute truth. This paper aims to analyze this paradoxical nature of parody and to demonstrate its implications by interpreting Jan Švankmajer’s film “Faust”.

Keywords : parody, resemantization, Švankmajer, Faust"

Necelých dvacet let po Vláčilově smrti máme možnost nahlédnout do velmi zeširoka a podrobně zpracovaného díla o jeho životě a díle, které nemá v české filmové literatuře obdoby ani konkurenci. Vznikl impozantní opus o 875 stranách, s více než 2500 poznámkami pod čarou a s 220 stranami vláčilovské dokumentace. Lektory publikace a jejími odbornými garanty jsou Zdena Škapová a Ondřej Koupil.