Moving Images

Over the past decade, a series of remarkable films—among them, those of the Romanian New Wave, the Berlin School, and nonfiction and experimental filmmakers such as Péter Forgács and Péter Kerekes—have presented complex new interpretations of the history of state-socialist Eastern Europe. In the process, they have become mainstays of the film festival circuit, and its corollary, film criticism. Despite this, critical understandings of cinema made in this place and time remain largely unchanged, and defined by a paradigm that dates to long before 1989. In this, postwar East European filmmakers struggle within monolithic film industries, isolated both from what preceded them and from the rest of the world—an image all too easily assimilated by criticism, with its longstanding valorization of the auteur.

Recent scholarship has offered necessary reassessments of this paradigm. ¹ This essay examines one aspect of this work, in which film and media historians have turned their attention to postwar media institutions, industries, and cultures and to the numerous modes of moving-image production beyond the well-known “festival films” that, in Dorota Ostrowska’s words, “showed . . . signs of dissent from the Socialist dogma”—and indeed, often beyond the fiction feature itself. ² Directly or indirectly influenced by histoire croisée and similar approaches to transnational history, as well as by film and media studies’ recent engagement with previously overlooked audiovisual practices and forms, this work links the history of postwar East European cinema not only to earlier media histories but also to contemporaneous media cultures stretching far beyond the region’s borders. ³ In what follows, I offer Czechoslovakia’s Army Film studio—its institutional identity, and the festival life of one of its films—as a case study that highlights these temporal and geographic through-lines.

Although it had existed in various forms since World War I, Czechoslovak military cinema gained momentum and direction in 1929, when soldier, filmmaker, photographer, and media critic Jiří Jeníček was appointed chief of the Ministry of Defense’s Film Group (Filmová skupina). Drawing on his wide readings in contemporary film and photographic criticism, and on institutional models such as the British Empire Marketing Board and General Post Office film units, Jeníček articulated a distinctive vision for the Film Group, whose cinematic goals, in his view, should mirror its institutional charge: If its films were to train soldiers, the Group itself should be a “training ground” for cinema itself; a space where its techniques and uses were perfected, and where filmmakers honed their talents and prepared for the profession. ⁴

This identity persisted into the early 1950s, after the Red Army had become the “model” for the Czechoslovak People’s Army. In these years, although the newly rechristened Czechoslovak Army Film studio (Československý armádni film) occupied a prominent position in the Stalinist Ministry of Defense’s burgeoning political-cultural apparatus, internal discussions of the studio continued to frame it in the pedagogical terms of the 1930s, as a critical institution for Czechoslovak cinema’s own “education.” A 1954 studio memorandum reflected this clearly, asking “whether young, talented filmmakers will be able to achieve self-realization in the Army, whether it will allow them to grow in their filmmaking skills, and, on the whole, whether an environment and atmosphere will be created that permits the production of good films.” ⁵

A decade later, in a shifting political climate, the military studio’s leaders once again discussed their work in such terms; this time, however, as part of a strategic deployment of film culture to make the Army appear up-to-date and in sync with Czechoslovakia’s increasingly antimilitary youth. Throughout the 1960s, the studio’s identity as a cinematic “training ground” was articulated in a range of films that varied widely in theme and approach—some of them explicitly antimilitary, many formally experimental—and a range of exhibition venues, among them television, international and domestic film festivals, and series of combined press screenings/conferences. After the first of the latter, in January 1964, critic Jaroslav Boček reported admiringly in the journal Kulturní tvorba about Army Film’s productions, whose innovative use of film language, he wrote, was a product of the studio’s “purposeful [účelový]” nature. It was, in his words, “precisely the industrial, experimental character of work in the studio that gave [its young filmmakers] the first opportunity to apply themselves in film.” ⁶

Boček’s characterization of Army Film summarizes the essence of this brief institutional history: the Czechoslovak Army’s unique “purposes” for cinema (primarily to train, educate, and inform) mandated that Army Film continually improve the way it fulfilled this institutional charge (e.g., through experimentation with film as a medium and cultural-social phenomenon, and professional pedagogy). These “purposes” and practices, in turn, formed the core of an institutional identity that remained continuous throughout a period that is more often understood in terms of temporal fractures. When we turn from this institution to one of its most important films of the 1960s, tracing why and where it traveled, “purpose” also reveals lines of connection that traverse the geopolitical boundaries of the Cold War.

The film, director Ivan Balaďa’s 1964 Man in a Great Hall (Človek vo veľkej hale), is an adaptation of journalist Ladislav Mňačko’s literary reportage of the same name, from his 1962 collection Where Dirt Roads End (Kde končia prašné cesty). Mňačko’s text captures the meditations on life and labor of a man observing another man monitoring a nuclear reactor, meditations that become critiques of labor practices and discourse in late socialism. In an attempt to give visual form to the reportage’s two registers (observation and reflection), Balaďa’s adaptation employs impressionistic, at times surrealist, imagery; most strikingly, a baby carriage on a grappling hook, dangling precariously above the reactor.

Though the film had very little indeed to do with the military, Army Film enthusiastically championed Man in a Great Hall. It was one of six productions chosen to represent the studio at the September 1964 “International Meeting of Army Film Workers” (Mezinárodní setkání armádních filmových pracovníků) in Warsaw, Poland, one of the yearly professional gatherings of Warsaw Pact military film studios. ⁷ It also won first prize in the category “Sociology of Human Relationships” at the 1966 International Labor and Industrial Film Triennial in Antwerp, Belgium. This was not unusual. Particularly during the 1960s, Czechoslovak Army films were frequent presences at foreign film festivals, screening and winning awards at events such as the major German short film festivals, Leipzig and Oberhausen, and just as frequently at specialized gatherings such as those in Warsaw and Antwerp. ⁸ Both types of festivals were understood as exercises in cultural diplomacy, and often served as a proving ground for the geopolitical conflicts of the period: On the eve of the 1962 Oberhausen festival, for instance, the West German government prevented East Germany from participating, which, as the Czechoslovak embassy in Berlin recounted in February 1963, required “the other countries of the socialist camp to cancel their participation.” ⁹ Festivals such as that in Antwerp, however, seem to have been defined less by bloc politics than by the institutional “purpose” that Boček discussed. Indeed, describing the 1963 edition of the International Labor and Industrial Film Triennial in a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Czechoslovak Embassy in Belgium urged participation by Czechoslovak films and filmmakers, particularly for the opportunity the triennial’s “study days” (on topics including “criteria for good industrial and labor films”) offered filmmakers to “exchange experience in this field.” ¹⁰

The different motivations for Man in a Great Hall’s travels abroad—and the fact that it was held up, seemingly without conflict, as an exemplar both of Warsaw Pact military culture and of universal “human” values—speak to the complexity of the maps that become visible when we follow such films as they move. Such complexity is, indeed, a central concern in recent scholarship on film festivals during the Cold War, which examines these events as, in Caroline Moine’s words, “a game of complex influences, not only unilateral or bilateral,” and “a space of contacts, in fact of circulation, exchange, and transfer.” ¹¹ In the case of Man in a Great Hall, this exchange was not only cultural, political, or social, but also professional. In Warsaw, the film helped demonstrate military filmmaking’s potential aesthetic, topical, and practical range; it did the same for industrial and labor filmmaking in Antwerp. Yet this complexity is also echoed in the institution that produced this film, whose history complicates the commonly perceived antagonism between state institutions and the auteur in postwar East European cinema, demonstrating how auteurs could be useful to institutions—and institutions useful to auteurs—as well as how institutions themselves could be “auteurist.” The reasons for and spaces to which Man in a Great Hall traveled, moreover, reinforce Anikó Imre’s argument about the importance of studying postwar East European media at a moment when media production, traffic, and reception in the European Union is of vital importance to both scholars and filmmakers. ¹²

More such maps of postwar East European moving images have been drawn, and others are underway. ¹³ Scholars are tracing the web of economic, political, and cultural connections between “Eastern” and “Western” cinema and media industries in coproductions, festivals, and diplomacy; uncovering the industrial, social, and institutional histories of studios and other spaces of production; examining overlooked media, movements, and genres (among them television and popular cinema); and revising canonical histories via archival sources. ¹⁴ The work involved is, in Sabine Hake’s apt phrasing, “materialist”—textual and archival. ¹⁵ Yet it also, as Army Film demonstrates, extends beyond itself, temporally, geographically, and conceptually.