Countering the Current: The Function of Cinematic Waves in Communist vs. Capitalist Societies (original) (raw)
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Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, 2022
The state’s efforts at privatization after the collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe often met with disapproval from cultural producers, who worried that their form of cultural production (often understood by them as “art” rather than “commodity”) required state patronage to survive. This paper examines the case of cinema in the Czech Republic and Poland. Using contemporary press sources, it traces how filmmakers responded to the new prominence of commercial cinema and their often-perceived loss of prestige and status of “autonomous artists”. Both the creative outputs and the discourse of filmmakers illustrate the changing values attached to the free market and to the purpose of cultural production in a market economy during transformation. Following a generational story, the paper establishes similarities between the discourse of different age groups of filmmakers in both countries; but at the same time, it accounts for the diverging acceptance of marketization by outlining country-specific differences: filmmakers searched for a language to critique or to affirm the transformation, their stance largely dependent on the extent to which they worked with inherited modes from the late socialist era, specific cultural traditions, and the financial conditions in which they operated.
Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 2018
The 1990s are perceived as a low creative point in V era Chytilov a's career and a far cry from her celebrated 1960s and 1970s films. While these were the focus of scholarly interest as rich landscape from which claims about gender-dynamics, cinema and authorial position under state-socialism can be gaged, her post-1989 body of work and her position within the transforming film culture attracted considerably less critical attention. Shifting focus from statesocialism, feminism and solely textual readings of her films, this essay examines '1990s Chytilov a' as a filmmaker in transition and a political activist. First, it explores her opposition to privatization of Barrandov Film Studios and identifies some of the discourses of privatization that gave the economic processes its socio-cultural meaning. Second, it looks at her films D edictv ı and Pasti, pasti, pasti cky in their production context arguing that they are best understood as a reflection of her adaptability to new conditions and an extension of her engagement in politics. In doing so, the essay thus reorients perception of Chytilov a's 1990s films and her development as a director. Moreover, it contributes to the understanding of privatization by shedding new light on the cinematic dimensions of the post-communist shift to capitalist democracy.
This essay examines the Czechoslovak State Film Company’s (CSF) handling of youth-oriented American imports including Rebel without a Cause (1955), Saturday Night Fever (1977), and Dirty Dancing (1987) in the late Cold War period. From an analysis of cultural policy statements, press coverage, and promotional materials, the essay argues that this organization framed such films in four historically situated ways reflecting changes in Czechoslovak Communist Party cultural policy: blaming parents for student unrest, demonizing American capitalist democracy, undermining subversive indigenous subcultures, and suggesting the liberalization of the cultural sphere. The authors posit that these approaches were rooted in important social and political developments of the late 1960 and were informed by conditions characterizing the period in which they were widely adopted. To date, historians have emphasized the concerns European claims-makers expressed about youth-oriented American fare in the second half of the twentieth century. By contrast, the case of the CSF not only develops understandings of this organization, but reveals that some European elites drew fairly positive conclusions about this type of film.
This anthology assembles some of the earliest Czech texts on film published in the period between 1908 and 1939, i.e., between the rise of art cinema and the outbreak of World War II, writings that were instrumental in shaping the various ways film was seen and understood in this formative period. The authors include scientist Jan Evangelista Purkinje, whose studies of the perception of movement from 1819 and 1820 laid the foundation for the rise of the cinematic apparatus, and writers and critics Václav Tille and Karel Čapek, who, years before their counterparts abroad, analyzed cinematic language as it was emerging, reflecting on its genealogy, genres, and future development. How was it possible that, in a country without a well-developed film industry, these cultural and literary critics, linguists, theater directors, architects, and filmmakers articulated ideas and concepts that predated later theoretical developments? This collection suggests that Czech writers benefited from their location at the crossroads of Eastern and Western Europe, where Austrian, Slavic, German, French, and American cultures intermingled. The anthology is organized both thematically and chronologically to reflect the rise of film as a new medium, a cultural institution, and an art form—in other words, to document the discursive construction of film in its variety and multiplicity. The writings express a number of concerns that relate to major trends and forces of modernity in the twentieth century: film is seen as a means to educate and enlighten, as an example of the dynamic relation between time and space, as a new formal model for other arts, as a tool for ideological struggle, and as a unique signifying system. While some of the authors are known to scholars in various fields—Purkinje to historians of science, Karel Teige to students of the European avant-garde, Jan Mukařovský and Roman Jakobson to literary scholars and linguists, and Alexander Hackenschmied (a.k.a. Hammid) to film historians—only a few of their texts on film have been translated into English, and this anthology marks the first time they have been systematically and critically assembled. In this sense, the anthology continues the efforts of recent publications and exhibitions to showcase Central Europe as the site of key moments in art and cultural history. At the same time, it also situates art movements and theories within the complex framework of modernity, whose major forces ranged from technology and mass media to national politics. Instead of focusing on the history of film theory in a narrow academic sense, the anthology presents the reader with a great diversity of genres and styles of writing that address the formation and development of this emblematic component of modernity. In the first half of the twentieth century, film was seen as a medium that overturned the existing hierarchy of cultural values and radically transformed individual subjective experience. The texts herein do not document these transformations from an external, impartial point of view; on the contrary, they are an integral part of these changes—their manifestation and their agents.
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.
Developments in Eastern European Cinema since 1989
The Routledge Companion to World Cinema. Routledge. R. Stone, P. Cooke, S. Dennison, A. Marlow-Mann (eds), 2018
This chapter examines the ways in which Eastern European cinema has become Europeanized. It looks at how the idea of Eastern Europe and its cinema has been shaped vis-à-vis the West, and redefined after the collapse of communism. Contrary to the received wisdom that a new paradigm emerged in 1989, this chapter argues that it is only since 2000 that Eastern European cinema has enjoyed recognition after the near collapse of its film industries in the 1990s. In the three case studies of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, Eastern European female directors and the Romanian New Wave, the chapter analyses the emergence in Eastern Europe of a new complex model of film production aligned with its larger European counterpart. This producer-driven model is based on three further aspects: the national film institutes, international co-productions and participation in film festivals.
Studies in European Cinema, 2020
Our study provides a comparison of recent Czech and Romanian production practices and state funding policies for film production, as well as, more broadly, of two film cultures that are less similar than research in the field has often assumed. The study presents the particularities of each national industry and shows how production practices and funding schemes influence each other. It also advances an idea to better understand the functioning of these two film cultures. It contends that, thirty years after 1989, they should be rather framed as European cinemas, and not only, as research has predominantly proposed, as Eastern European, small, or post-socialist.
Territories: A Trans-Cultural Journal of Regional Studies , 2020
Comparing the work of late-socialist-era directors Roman Balayan and Mircea Daneliuc with the postsocialist work of Sergey Loznitsa, in this paper I attempt to show that the non-linearity of postmodernism embraced by some directors in postsocialism is more indebted to the work of socialistera directors in Eastern Europe than we might think. Furthermore, I explore the differences of what some critics have called the censorship-dominated style of the so-called “dissident cinema” of socialism and that of the postsocialist directors whose style is predicated on alleged complete freedom of expression. The goal of this comparative approach is to show that, despite the fact that socialist cinema since the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe has been freely associated with indoctrination and propaganda, socialist-era filmmaking represents not only an unforgettable episode in the history of Eastern European cinema, but one that decidedly influenced the aesthetics of what some theorists have dubbed the current nonlinear, post-digital age of contemporary film. Finally, I argue that the 1980s in Eastern Europe and Russia brought to cinema a far more philosophical, complex, and multi-layered approach and style that commented on the human condition from surprisingly less ideological positions than the more celebrated non-linear style of contemporary filmmaking does today. Word count: 7,864