Czechoslovak cinema began attracting international attention in the 1960s, with bold, experimental films soon labelled a national ‘New Wave.’ However, the origins of this New Wave are infrastructural as much as they are creative; it was enabled both by the post-Stalin ‘Thaw’ across the Soviet Bloc and by unique local conditions.
After World War II, the Czechoslovak film industry underwent multiple phases of restructuring. Though this happened across Europe, in the Czechoslovak case, the transformation was especially intensive because it took place under a new communist government. Film industry processes and priorities were guided by the young state’s rapidly evolving, often conflicting ideological and economic aims, which in turn largely relied on policy signals from the USSR.
This blog post provides an overview of the Czechoslovak film industry in the postwar period, from 1945 into the 1960s, when the Czechoslovak New Wave gained international attention. The focus will be on infrastructural changes that affected the country’s cinematic culture and output, including its position and reputation in the global cinematic network. Since the communist Czechoslovak government strove to imitate Soviet economic practices and import aspects of Soviet culture, the post will necessarily involve a comparative dimension with the USSR. However, it is committed to treating the Czechoslovak case as historically unique, rather than derivative of a broad Soviet or socialist-Bloc pattern.
From Third Republic to Communism State: Cinema for the People?
In 1945, Czechoslovakia was liberated from German occupation, and the democratic Third Republic was established. As was the case across postwar Europe, leftist parties dominated government. In Czechoslovakia, this included the Communist Party (KSČ), which enjoyed broad support, allowing it to spread its influence across government offices and institutions. The Communists were particularly involved in postwar cultural policy through their dominance of the Ministry of Information, from which they pushed an agenda of ‘democratization of culture,’ which aimed to make education and culture more accessible to the population, largely by bringing it under state control (Knapík 40).
Indeed, cinema was the first branch of the economy to be nationalized by a 1945 decree. This decision was not just a communist initiative, but built on pre-war momentum towards favoring a national cinema that would be independent from commercial pressures (Knapík 42). A nationalized cinema aligned with the Third Republic’s broader goal of shoring up (implicitly Slavic) Czechoslovak culture against German dominance, which had a long history beyond WWII. Once the nationalization law passed, the KSČ-controlled film department of the Ministry of Information appointed pro-communist personnel to head existing sectors of the film industry, and established new institutions, governing bodies and agencies, like State Dramaturgy, and the Film Artistic Board, to tighten control over the creative (and thus ideological) aspects of film production.
However, as Jiří Knapík writes in the book Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960 (ed. Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal, 2017), nationalization also professionalized film production: “in addition to the founding of the Czechoslovak Film Institute, this period also saw the creation of the Film faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts (Filmová fakulta Akademie múzických umění, FAMU),” the leading Czechoslovak film school, which still operates with a strong international reputation (46). Located in central Prague, at the heart of the country’s film industry, FAMU would soon train the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave.
Reorganization of cultural industries accelerated in 1948, when the KSČ seized power in a coup, officially bringing Czechoslovakia into the Soviet Bloc. The same year, the new leadership completed centralization of the film industry and carried out a major overhaul—firstly, through a wave of ideological purges across all cultural sectors, and secondly, by attempting to fundamentally restructure its processes and institutions. New bodies were created, including the Czechoslovak State Film (Československý státní film, ČSF), the national enterprise in charge of production, and two new political approval boards, the Film Council (Filmová rada, FR) and Central Dramaturgy (Ústřední dramaturgie, ÚD).
“Lažanské Palace, building of the Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, Slavia Cafe on the ground floor (photo from Legií Bridge)” [translated from Czech caption]. Photo by VitVit, Wikimedia Commons.
Taken together, these new bodies and the processes they enforced created a dense and cumbersome bureaucratic network that proved counterproductive to the new state’s lofty goals of harnessing the power of cinema to nurture a national culture of socialism. The essence of the strategy was to reshape cultural sectors on the model of industrial factory production: strict government planning, oversight, top-down quotas and timelines. As Knapík explains, “the effort to rigorously plan and politically control film production in the years 1948–1951 led to the creation of a bureaucratically demanding process of approval that caused an abrupt decline in both artistic and formal standards of films and directly contributed to a disproportional increase in the time needed to make a film because ‘fundamental’ ideological suggestions could potentially turn up in every phase of the approval process” (48).
In his chapter in Cinema in Service of the State, Petr Szczepanik details the struggles and ultimate failure of the government to reform film production, ridding it of lingering bourgeois practices and turning it into a proper proletarian ‘film factory.’ Szczepanik begins with “dramaturgy,” the central model of production of Czechoslovak theater before and during WWII. The dramaturgy system, unique to Eastern Bloc film, was organized into creative units headed by a “dramaturge,” whose responsibilities included pre- (and occasionally post-) production: developing scripts, selecting cast and crews, and sometimes shooting, editing, and distribution. The creative units were essentially film producers, but without the financial and marketing responsibilities of a capitalist system. The dramaturges were also key cultural intermediaries who enforced state policies within individual projects; “they mediated between writers and directors, as well as between studios, the political establishment and broader cultural trends” (Szczepanik 72).
These units, which existed during the war and in the Third Republic, were reorganized after the communist coup of 1948. Until then, Szczepanik writes, they had “partly functioned as hidden successors of the two private production companies that dominated the domestic industry during World War II” (73). These existing units of experienced professionals were then dissolved and replaced by “‘creative teams,’ staffed with dozens of inexperienced, young communist writers and journalists. Until 1953, these units were progressively centralized, disempowered and isolated from the actual production processes and communities. After 1954, however, a gradual process of decentralization and liberalization opened a space for increasingly critical and aesthetically innovative films produced by units that functioned as semi-independent producers” (Szczepanik 73).
The replacement of veteran filmmakers with young, loyal communists failed, as it interrupted the regular, gradual process of professional transfer: the new ‘filmmakers’ lacked the formal training and informal experience necessary to make the high-quality, popular films that the regime demanded. In addition to swapping out key personnel, the government also attempted another measure to create a proletarian ‘film factory,’ which would also backfire. After 1948, the KSČ tried to relocate film professionals from their “traditional geography” of Wenceslas Square in the upscale center of Prague to Barrandov Studios on the outskirts of the city. From the Party perspective, it was desirable to unite technical and professional film workers in one space, both for easier top-down oversight of the production process, and to foster a new, democratized film culture that didn’t distinguish between intellectual and manual work.
Predictably, the cultural intelligentsia uprooted from central Prague resented the change. In addition to personal inconveniences, they argued that it was absurd to try to subject creative work to industrial rhythms. In Wenceslas Square, professionals could move freely between production and distribution offices and high-quality cinemas, elegant cafes, and social clubs. Much of their work depended on informal social networks, and was carried out outside of formal work structures. To be productive, they argued, they needed to be able to come and go as they please, work when the inspiration strikes, see movies and plays, and be in lively contact with other creatives—not arriving for your shift, punching a timecard, staying the allotted time, and then clocking out.
Yellow stars showing locations of FAMU (top left), Wenceslas Square, the traditional center of Czechoslovakia’s film industry (top right), and Barrandov Film Studios on the outskirts of Prague (bottom). Screenshot of Google Maps taken by author, Dec 8 2024.
The new ‘film factory’ workflow was satirized by famous actor and playwright Jan Werich:
“I came to the studio in the morning... Then I marked my time card. I sat in my office and started thinking... I got no idea... After lunch, I finally got an idea and started to write... In the evening it appeared stupid to me. So I cut it out. I marked my time card again and went home.
”
Ostensibly, this push was an imitation of the Soviet model, literally shaped by imported (and outdated) Soviet training manuals. However, the Soviet film industry itself was in deep production crisis by the late Stalin period, with annual feature film output in the single digits, and would soon abandon the heavy-handed, top-down approach in favor of a more flexible model that gave more liberty to creative workers, and even took into account commercial factors. Thus, ironically, the new Czechoslovak state imported the failures of the Soviet system, rather than its successes.
However, the underlying source of inefficiency differed in each case. In the USSR, the Stalinist regime had so consolidated power that filmmakers feared punishment if their work failed to meet the dictator’s ever-more-severe standards. Meanwhile, the young Czechoslovak state was in a different period of its institutional and political development, still characterized by power disputes between various actors. In the cultural sector, this was largely reflected in the antagonism between the Central Committee’s head ideologist, Gustav Bareš, and the Minister of Information Václav Kopecký (Knapík 51). Despite a lack of clear and stable ideological directives, movie scripts were subject to stringent reviews and revision demands before the creative unit could begin production. The cumulative effect of the new regime’s experiments in cultural management soon became apparent: in 1951, only seven feature films were produced— fewer even than under Nazi occupation.
However, film remained paramount for government cultural policy. During the same period, the Communist Party pursued “systematic ‘cinefication,’” which included building cinemas, so that Czechoslovakia soon became Europe’s countries with the densest networks of theaters (Knapík 48). Thus, the infrastructure for a robust film culture was put in place, even if the products were still lacking.
In the spirit of fostering a proletarian film culture, a tradition of workers’ film festivals was also established in this period (Knapík 49). At the first Workers’ Film Festival in Zlín in summer 1948, special panels of blue collar workers were assembled to review films according to “class criteria,” as part of government efforts to impose the socialist realist standards of the USSR on Czechoslovak cultural production. The judgments of these workers were specifically intended to oppose the (Western-oriented, bourgeois) international jury of critics at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, first held in 1946 at the nearby town of Mariánské Lázně, and meant as a showcase for the newly nationalized Czechoslovak film industry, then still under the Third Republic. These worker panels even gained the ability to ban films and censor directors they found ideologically or aesthetically inappropriate, an ability they deployed with pleasure.
Czechoslovak Thaw and New Wave
Prague’s main train station with banner that reads “We will fulfill comrade Klement Gottwald’s legacy.” Taken in the 1950s (after the death of Communist Party leader Klement Gottwald in 1953). Original description: “Praha Hlavní nádraží, 2. pol. 50. let 20. stol., vchod do odjezdové haly s heslem Odkaz soudruha Klementa Gottwalda splníme.” Image by Miroslav Dvořák, Wikimedia Commons.
Two landmark deaths in 1953 opened the doors for gradual liberalization in Czechoslovakia: Joseph Stalin, and the Czechoslovak Communist party head Klement Gottwald. In fall of the same year, Czechoslovakia announced a ‘New Course,’ which included placing more open-minded figures in leadership positions, and green-lighting much-needed changes to institutions and processes across the country, including film.
The governing bodies managing cinema began moving towards decentralization, spreading out decision-making across a body of semi-autonomous, regional organizations somewhat removed from the central party apparatus. On the production side, the 1950s saw a gradual shift away from the rigid attempts to force filmmaking into a strict industrial process, even before 1953. This momentum culminated in January 1963, when the “Central Committee commissioned the director of Czechoslovak Film to liberate film production from all remaining ‘inappropriate and outdated indicators for measuring industrial production’” (Szczepanik 78). According to Szczepanik, this not only provided the necessary political infrastructure of creative autonomy necessary for the artistic innovations of the New Wave, but reflected the government’s growing recognition of the commercial potential of Czechoslovak film, including on a global scale.
Szczepanik writes: “Functionaries readily sacrificed quantitative norms like budget and salary averages or limits on overtime work, as well as lengthy and centralized approval procedures, to allow for more flexible practices that they expected would contribute to further festival awards. These would in turn result in distribution and broadcast deals with ‘capitalist’ countries as well as more commissions from Western producers, who would rediscover Barrandov and its cheap labour pool and bring much-needed dollars into the country. By that time, though, dramaturges and writers were already back in their clubs and cafés in central Prague” (78).
Left to right, 1: Exterior of Hotel Europa in Wenceslas Square, Prague. Source: © Raimond Spekking / CC BY-SA 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).
2: Interior of Hotel Europa, by Filip Tomáška, permission to use granted to author.
3: Interior of Cafe Europe, at the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square. Source: DIMSFIKAS, Wikimedia Commons.
4: Wenceslas Square viewed from the top of the National Museum. Source: VitVit, Wikimedia Commons.
The gradual liberalization of the 1950s facilitated an increased volume and diversification of output, including a split developing between popular genre entertainment and more high-brow artistic fare. New film journals and magazines, notably Film a doba (Film and Time) launched in 1954, provided an outlet for intellectual and critical discourse for filmmakers and film lovers alike, and in the late 1950s, newly authorized local film clubs attracted large followings, especially among younger generations. Crucially, these were allowed to screen “important works of world cinema,” and thus provided contact with global (especially Western) film culture for the average, interested viewer (Knapík 60). Meanwhile, increased allowance of movie imports from Western countries also put filmmakers and audiences back in touch with key global cinematic trends.
Following new Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev’s shocking denunciation of Stalinism in 1956, cultural liberalization in Czechoslovakia went even further, as more people dared to publicly critique the stifling bureaucracy. This moment of widespread loss of faith in the system as it existed among the Czechoslovak creative intelligentsia, called a “crisis of ideology,” would continue to resonate into the 1960s, despite a shock of repression in 1960. In this decade, a new generation of young filmmakers with a shared ambivalence towards the socialist state began exploring more diverse themes and experimenting with the artistic medium (Knapík 57).
They soon caught the attention of the international cinematic community with films like Miloš Forman’s Lásky jedné plavovlásky (Loves of a Blonde, 1965), which won praise from critics around the world when it was screened at the New York Film Festival, the London Film Festival, and the Venice Film Festival, where it was nominated for the highest prize. Forman and his cohort of like-minded directors were christened the Czechoslovak New Wave, and thus canonized as a key movement of 1960s art cinema.
Conclusion: Local and Global
Just as their artistic expression was both unique to Czechoslovak culture and part of global cinematic trends, the infrastructural affordances that made the New Wave possible were both locally specific and generalizable. Both capitalist and socialist European countries in this period were preoccupied with boosting their cinemas’ commercial viability and international prestige, particularly against the hegemony of Hollywood. In Czechoslovakia, this meant abandoning the dated Soviet film-factory model and reorganizing production to allow creative workers the necessary flexibility and autonomy to make high-quality films for the national and international markets. Czechoslovakia’s geographic location on the border of East and Western Europe encouraged the return of its longstanding ambition to serve as a bridge between the two cultural spheres; in cinema, this included import and screenings of both Soviet and some Western films, as well as hosting the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. Due to a confluence of institutional and infrastructural factors in the 1950s and into the 60s, Czechoslovak cinema was able to flourish for a full decade, until the ‘normalization’ policies after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion (not to mention the gradual replacement of cinema with new media forms, like television) began pulling the system in a different direction.
Works Cited
Szczepanik, Petr. “‘Veterans’ and ‘Dilettantes’: Film Production Culture vis-à-vis Top-Down Political Changes, 1945-1962.” In Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960, edited by Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal. Berghahn, 2017, pp. 71-88.
Knapík, Jiří. “Czechoslovak Culture and Cinema, 1945–1960.” In Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, 1945-1960, edited by Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal. Berghahn, 2017, pp. 39-68.
Further reading
Czechoslovak Film Industry
Karl, Lars and Pavel Skopal, editors. Cinema in Service of the State: Perspectives on Film Culture in the GDR and Czechoslovakia. 1945-1960. Berghahn, 2017.
Skopal, Pavel. "The Cinematic Shapes of the Socialist Modernity Programme: Ideological and economic parameters of cinema distribution in the Czech Lands, 1948–70 1." Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. Routledge, 2013. 81-98.
Czechoslovak New Wave
Hames, Peter. The Czechoslovak New Wave. University of California Press, 1985.
Forman, Miloš, and Jan Novák. Turnaround : A Memoir. First edition, Villard Books, 1994.
Buchar, Robert. Czech New Wave Filmmakers in Interviews. McFarland, 2004.
Karlovy Vary / Film Festivals
Bláhova, Jindřiška. “National, Socialist, Global: The Changing Roles of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, 1946-1956.” In Cinema in Service of the State, edited by Lars Karl and Pavel Skopal, Berghahn Books, 2017, pp. 245-272.
Bláhová, Jindřiška. “Political significance of A Butcher in Love: the 1956 Karlovy Vary international Film Festival, Marty (1955) and the Restoration of Contact between Hollywood and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.” Studies in European Cinema, vol. 17, no. 2, 2020, pp. 97-112.
Câmara, Regina. “From Karlovy Vary to Cannes. The Brazilian Cinema Novo at the European film festivals of the 1960s.” In Cultural Transfer and Political Conflicts. Film Festivals in the Cold War, edited by Andreas Kötzing and Caroline Moine. Göttingen, 2017, pp. 63-77.