Jan Culik

Alena Heitlinger & Susanna Trnka, 'Young Women of Prague'

A review of a monograph dealing with the position of women in Czechoslovakia under communism.

In search of authenticity: Věra Chytilová's films from two eras

Abstract Czech film maker Vera Chytilova was the first woman ever who was allowed to study film direction at FAMU, the Film Academy in Prague. She was an important member of the generation of the Czech New Wave of the 1960s. Particularly well known internationally is Chytilovas film Daisies, which is regarded by critics as a highly innovative contribution to world cinema. This article traces the history of Chytilovás artistic development through the liberal 1960s in communist Czechoslovakia, when film making was free of ideological and commercial pressures, and compares it with her work made in the 1970s and 1980s, in an era when Czechoslovak film makers were under ideological pressure and worked in a society which had adopted conformism and consumerism. While it would appear that Chytilová mostly gave up her bold stylistic experimentation in this period of ‘normalisation’, she never gave up her personal integrity and successfully communicated her moral concern even under conditions of strong censorship and bureaucratic pressure.

Critical lives: Václav Havel

A review of a monograph by Kieran Williams on Vaclav Havel, an important Czech playwright, dissent and later President of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic.

The Godless Czechs? Cinema, Religion, and Czech National Identity

The Czech Republic seems to be somewhat different from other Central and Eastern European countries. Current sociological research has repeatedly stated that the population of the Czech Republic is now overwhelmingly atheist. Czech cinema reveals traces of the complex history that connects nationalism, religion and Czech national mythology. Thankfully, cultural theorists like Geert Hofstede and Stuart Hall have provided a useful framework to analyze the details of this relationship. The Communist regime tried hard to influence what and how its citizens thought through the power discourse of its propaganda. The overall attitude of Czech cinema towards religion seems to be critical. Few Czech films deal with genuine spirituality. Most of them regard religious organizations as metaphors of oppression, inflexibility and a closed mind. This narrative seems to be fully in line with the prevailing attitudes in contemporary Czech society, which is remarkably atheistic. Keywords:cinema; communism; Czech National Identity; Geert Hofstede; Religion; spiritual; Stuart Hall

Sex, embarrassment and cruelty

Literatura faktů: the literature of facts. This was the common term to denote nonfiction in the former Czechoslovakia, and it is still widely used today in both Czech and Slovak (derived from the German FaktLiteratur). This monograph is such a book of facts on the Slovak ‘New Wave’ director Ján Kadár. There is, however, a distinct tradition among a certain generation of Czech and Slovak scholars where facts are researched and gathered but no attempt at a selection, let alone an interpretation, is made. The present monograph, unfortunately, conforms to this tradition, so the reader will find here

The bizarre and the unusual under socialism

The last decade or so has witnessed an increased interest in animated films. One reason is the worldwide popularity of animated films, of which the successes of the Shrek franchise and Japanese anime films are the best-known examples. Another factor is a blurring of the boundaries between live action and animated films. Yet, despite this upsurge in interest and the fact that Eastern Europe used to be at the forefront of animation produced for adult viewers, there is little published on this subject, either inside or outside the old Soviet Bloc. The book by Ülo Pikkov is thus a welcome addition to this small library. Animasophy is meant to serve three principal functions, of which two are presented explicitly and one not. One function is to serve as an introduction to the study of this genre. Pikkov’s book fulfils this function well. Readers who want to learn, for example, about the early history or pre-history of animation or its main techniques, such as magic lanterns, can find simple and clear answers in eleven chapters and an appendix, providing a short history of animation, entitled ‘Milestones of animation’. The answers, moreover, are verbal, pictorial

Peter Hames's Stimulating Personal Journey Through Czech and Slovak Cinema of the last Hundred Years

Peter Hames’s most recent work on Czech and Slovak cinema raises a number of interesting methodological questions. How do you actually analyse the cinematic history of two national cultures spanning over a century and several political regimes, within the space of some 230 pages (the remaining part of Peter Hames’s work being taken up by his bibliography)? As he says, ‘since 1918, Czech feature film production has numbered more than 2000 films and Slovak production over 350’ (p. 13). How do you deal with this plethora of material within a fairly slim volume, especially since no critical history of Czech and Slovak cinema of the past century exists even in Czech or Slovak? Peter Hames takes a highly personal approach and openly admits that ‘there are many subjects, areas and directors that have not been considered’ (p. 13). He bravely enters the jungle of Czech and Slovak film-making by ‘stalking it out’: he isolates a series of orientation points within the thick forest and joins the dots. He has divided Czech and Slovak film-making into eleven categories, each of which has a chapter of approximately twenty pages. Within these chapters, Hames concentrates on a handful of films that have personally fascinated him the most, although at the beginning and end of each chapter there are shorter remarks on other films. The works that he discusses date from the 1920s up to the present. Most attention is given to Czech and Slovak cinema of the 1960s, a period to which the author has devoted considerable attention in previous writing. Some of the chapters in his book are thematic (History, Politics, the Holocaust), others are genre-based (Comedy, Lyricism, Surrealism, the Avant-garde). Some critics might dislike this as methodologically inconsistent. Theoretically, you could have comedies dealing with historical themes, politics or the holocaust, or lyrical, surrealist and/or avant-garde films on these themes. But I would defend Peter Hames here, because it is extremely difficult to create these categories. The material discussed simply dictates how it should be divided. Some Czech or Slovak films defy categorization in any case. For instance, can Černý Petr/Peter and Paula (1963), Forman’s study of teenage fumbling and middle-age disorientation, or the short film adaptations of Hrabal’s boisterous and eccentric texts that make up Perličky na dně/Pearls of the Deep (1965) really be described as comedies? Is Menzel’s film Ostře sledované vlaky/Closely Observed Trains (1966) also a comedy? The young protagonist of Ostře sledované vlaky grapples with his sexual problems, trying to reach maturity, and when he ‘becomes a man’ he dies. Is that a comedic ending? It is extremely difficult to put some of the films into chapters. Each of Peter Hames’s eleven thematic or genre-based chapters starts with a highly informed, succinct cultural, historical and/or political introduction. A brief outline of Czechoslovak history in the twentieth century is given and background information on literary, artistic and cultural developments is

'Václav Havel: Civic Responsibility in the Postmodern Age' by James F. Pontuso

THE KEY TO UNDERSTANDING this book lies in its subtitle: it does not examine ‘governance’ in the traditional domestic sense, but focuses on explaining Russian politics in terms of the interaction of geopolitics and domestic factors. Whilst there have been many studies of Russia’s foreign policy and at least as many about its post-communist political path in the past 15 years, the strength of this book lies in demonstrating the interconnection between the two. The majority of the book focuses on foreign policy, strategic partnership and security. It begins with a useful chapter outlining the philosophical debates which have been fought over the centuries between the ideas of pan-Slavism, socialist continentalism, Western engagement and Eurasianism, and their various off-shoots. The author goes on to analyse the factors currently informing the country’s foreign policy, arguing that, alongside a desire to maintain a multilateral balance, ‘. . . the foreign policy decisions (right or wrong) are taken on the basis of their pragmatic usefulness’ (p. 21). It is this ‘pragmatic usefulness’, we learn throughout the book, which informs much of President Putin’s broader agenda at home and abroad. The remainder of the first half of the book focuses on Russia’s geopolitical strategy and its international engagements, with useful summaries of the country’s dealings since the collapse of the Soviet Union with NATO, the EU, the OSCE and various Western, Asian and Central European states. According to this account, once again it is pragmatism which informs Russian diplomacy; its many-faceted programme of multilateralism and regionalism seeks to achieve a balance between the different geopolitical groupings, notwithstanding the dominance of the EU in Russia’s economic relations (it accounts for 57% of the country’s external trade, compared with just 6% with the US and 1.6% with Japan—p. 58). Other topics touched upon include the role of Russia in the global ‘war against terror’ and changes in its foreign policy in light of the heightened terror risk domestically and internationally (p. 120). The second part of the book is titled ‘domestic reforms’, but once again it is the issue of security which is central to its examination of civil –military relations and defence. The main focus of this section is on military reform and the role of the military in domestic politics— including the fascinating statistic that about a third of the 1999 – 2003 State Duma deputies had links with the military and were officers in the reserve (p. 200). Also contained within this section, at first sight slightly incongruously, is a chapter examining the main domestic reforms undertaken by Putin since coming to power—most notably, the restructuring of regional and local government. This chapter is a well-synthesised examination of a process which has hitherto been researched in a somewhat piecemeal fashion, and in itself represents an interesting summary of the process. The reason for including it in a book that focuses primarily on foreign and security policy becomes clearer as the reader continues:

'Slovakia after Communism and Mečiarism' edited by Kieran Williams"

Review of: Saxonberg, S., The Fall: a Comparative Study of the End of Communism in Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Poland. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2001. xvii + 434pp. ISBN: 9789058230973.

The reception of Czech independent literature since 1989

An article summarising the reception of Czech independent literature in the first decade of the post-communist era.