Czech New Wave Research Papers (original) (raw)

"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."