The preferred meanings and the unwelcomed pleasures
The use of paratexts for movies’ ideological framing in Czechoslovakia
of the Stalinist era
My paper is focused on two specific practices used in movie´s distribution and
exhibition in the short period of the years 1952 and 1953 in Czechoslovakia. I believe
that these cases, even if they were rather idiosyncratic and short-run, can provide a
more precise outline how the Stalinist era re-defined the basic characteristics of the
experience of cinema-going.
The intention of the communist regime, which was established after the putsch in
February 1948, was to define the cinema as a space for “education” and ideological
indoctrination that mediates the “proper” /proepr/ culture-political values to the
viewers.
The regime evolved a scale of measures how to discipline the cinemagoers – the most
extensively used one was pushing the state enterprises to buy hundreds of tickets for
their employees. Nevertheless, it resulted rather in selling tickets than in bringing
people to the auditorium.
Paradoxically, in the harsh period of political processes in 1952, a mild
“liberalization” of the cultural policy – which was an outcome of the internal fight for
the power with the “radicals” – gave a chance to appease the economic demands of the
film industry by distribution of a few movies that would be more attractive for the
viewers.
(Charts 1 and 2)
There were two possible sources of attractive movies – both were, however, highly
problematic from the regime´s ideological point of view. The first one was the
production of the western countries; the second one was the Czech movies from the
1930s and 1940s. The Minister of Information approved the possibility to screen old
Czech pictures already in January 1951, and 18 of them were re-released in 1952. This
production was still perceived as highly problematic, however. Both these movies and
the few pictures from the western countries were screened mostly in suburbian theatres
and in small cities, which launched a kind of cinematic tourism. But what is more
significant for the presented argument, the copies with some of the Czech movies were
endowed with a textual introduction. The following examples will show you what kind
of argumentation was used to excuse the movies´ “imperfection” and to give them the
appropriate ideological frame.
The term “frame” is used here in line with the tradition of discursive analysis which
followed Erwing Goffman´s work.
The first example:
FATHER KONDELIK AND THE GROOM VEJVARA (Miroslav Josef Krňanský, 1937)
“The movie was based on the well-known life work of Ignát Herrmann – he gave a true image
of Czech little townsmen of the end of the 19 th and the start of the 20th century. Kondelík is a
literary type of a Czech townsman – a type so apt that he became an embodiment of
townsmen´s mentality.
Only in present days we are able to appreciate properly the realistic art of Herrmann.
Bourgeoisie degraded him to mere humorist with the intention to cover the critical parts of his
work. The film version prefers to entertain the viewers and does not express the sharpness of
the author´s satire – but the time distance of fifteen years gives us a chance to recognize the
true critic sharpness of the work.”
THE GUILD OF KUTNA HORA VIRGINS (Otakar Vávra, 1938)
“The movie was shot in 1938, in the time of pre-war political tensions before the Munich
Agreement. Its intention was to strength Czech people´s awareness and to warn against
traitors. The movie´s authors joined two classical plays of Ladislav Stroupežnický … The
film´s story is set in miner´s city Kutná Hora and is led by a positive approach of the authors
towards exploited miners – the miners roused up against bailiffs serving to the interests of the
foreign aristocracy and bureaucracy.”
In line with the explicit recommendation of the minister of Information “not to
mention” the popular stars of 1940s as Adina Mandlová or Hana Vítová (both played a
part in the second movie), the text highlighted other values: the “classical” or
undervalued literary sources, the “progressive” attitude of the authors towards social
classes, and the relative values the works represented in the concrete historical
situations they were made in.
We can reasonably assume, I believe, that the addressees of the textual framing were
rather the party and governmental bodies as the keepers of the cinema´s ideological
purity than the viewers.
To find out what was the reception of the cinema programs in the early 1950s, I
used, among others, a specific source of viewer´s comments on the cinema exhibition
– the interviews with Czech emigrants which were done for the Radio Free Europe. I
realize that the testimonies could have been angled by an effort to give an account of
oneself as a victim of a cruel regime. But we can evaluate the interviews comparing
them to our knowledge of the era – and most of them result from the test as highly
reliable. Besides, they are a rare opportunity to get rather sincere comments on movies
and the cinema in the period of political processes and severe censorship.
A 16-year-old emigrant to Berlin described minutely a screening of the American
movie THE SEVENTH CROSS in 1953 in Prague. It was one of the only two American
movies – and one of the six „Western“ movies – premiered in the Czechoslovak
cinemas in 1953. The boy was able to repeat almost exactly the text which preceded
the movie.
There is the caption in its full version: O:
“The movie was shot in Hollywood in the time of the last war. However, the producer was not
motivated by idealism to make the movie. In the war period, it served Hollywood to give an
illusion of progressiveness – even that the attitude could have been a money-making one, by
the way.
The movie was based on a novel by the German democratic writer Anna Seghers, the laureate
of the international peace award.”
According to the boy, the reaction of the cinema-goers as well as of his mother was:
“They could do that more often – to put communist twaddle [tvodl] at the start of a film
and then to screen an American movie.”
But the caption was not the only way the American movie was framed. THE SEVENTH
CROSS, together with 15 other movies in 1953, was exhibited in a double-feature
program. The presentation of a Soviet documentary added to the main feature
provided an excuse for increasing the fee for the movies which were most attractive
for the viewers – and, at the same time, it offered an indisputable alibi for screening
entertaining generic movies:
The State Film defended the practice by saying that it had been trying to “add
culturally and politically valuable film supplements to the ideologically weaker films.
The supplements would normally not be seen by most viewers on other occasions”.
By coincidence, however, the Czechoslovak State Film launched the practice of
double-features in a specific, highly dramatic and explosive moment – two weeks after
the currency reform performed in June 1953. The so called “reform” was, in fact, a
great state robbery, followed by a revolt and a wave of strikes (there were 146 of them,
in comparison to 2 strikes in the previous year).
This context sharpened the conflict between the demand for entertainment and
distraction from the side of citizens and the regulation and control of the theatrical
space from the side of the regime´s bodies. The tension was only strengthened by the
fact that the Soviet documentaries as Soviet Moldavia or Through the Altai presented
the impoverished viewers the alleged /aledžd/ dynamic modernization of the Soviet
republics. According to the Czechoslovak magazine Kino, the documentaries “give the
true image of affluence and happiness of the Soviet people and persuade of the world
primacy of the Soviet science and engineering.”
In fact, the line between entertainment and propaganda had divided the time-space
of exhibition and the experience of cinema-going already before the double-features.
An emigrant aptly described the content of newsreels screened in 1952 and the
atmosphere during the screening:
“A show usually starts with a newsreel, then a „short subject“ and then the main feature.
Newsreels are a combination of the Czech and the Russian Novosti Dna. They are
almost always the same – showing new constructions, dams, canals, Kolkhozes,
factories, etc., and ceremonies honoring this or that dignitary or worker. There is also a
lot of footage on the Korean War, with shots of valiant North Korean soldiers. Helena
said there was almost no news of other western countries; the only exception she could
remember was one story taken in Western Germany, where German families were
displaced from their homes to make room for occupation troops. When Gottwald or
Stalin appears on the screen, the audience is usually respectfully silent; a few people
clap but no one dares demonstrate against them.”
After the currency reform however, the remark that “no one dares demonstrate”
against the regime throughout the screening did not hold true. A bulletin /buletn/
published for the central committee of the communist party affirms that people were
arrested for their reactions to the newsreels screened in cinemas.
The critical situation after the reform and the clash between the yearned-for
entertaining movies and the propagandistic documentaries changed the practice of
double features from a commercial device to a provocative and explosive mixture.
On the 1st July 1953, the Czech writer Čestmír Jeřábek made this record in his
secretly written diary:
“In the afternoon, we have seen a European movie after a long time (a French one:
FAN-FAN THE TULIP). But before this, we had to eat through an extremely boring
“educational” Russian movie about Soviet Moldavia, which supposedly is a real
Schlaraffenland, /a fairytale country/ full of milk and honey (but Russians are out of luck with
their propaganda: in these days newspapers wrote about a forced state loan in Soviets.
…) Right across the street in front of the cinema, there was a long queue for potatoes.”
Most of the Soviet documentaries were rather long – they lasted between 40 and 60
minutes, which increased the risk that some part of the cinema-goers would prefer
avoiding them. It was probably the reason why the exhibition practice was not firmly
established – the documentary was screened sometimes before and sometimes after the
feature. The emigrants provided vivid stories on the tactical fight between the
viewers and the cinema managers:
„The informant had interesting experience with the visit of the English movie WHERE NO
VULTURES FLY. … There were about 500 people in front of the cinema. … They were waiting in
a queue because the cinema was in reconstruction and only few rows with chairs were
available at the moment. The cinema managers surprised them, however – the main feature
WHERE NO VULTURES FLY was screened immediately after the newsreels. When people
noticed that, a bustle started. People raced to get chairs…
When the movie ended, all people left the cinema. Two policemen staying at the entrance
informed them that a Soviet movie would be screened, but they did not succeed – only a few
people stayed. “Who would watch a think such as the “Azerbaijan” or other antics Volga-Don.
People were in a good mood after the English movie and did not want to spoil it by a Russian
bullshit.” – in this way the informer characterized the atmosphere after the screening.””
25-year-old woman, August 1953
“The movie posters give no indication as to which film will be shown first. This varies with
each showing so that those attending are always in the dark as to in which order the films are
to be shown. This is supposed to prevent the audience from only attending the Western film.
The films are presented one after the other without a pause inbetween. This measure is also for
the purpose of hindering the audience from leaving the theater in the instance when the
Western film is shown first. … All of these matters are in vain. If the public accidentally
learned – through an employee of the theater who tells his acquaintances, who in turn pass
the word on – that the Russian film is to be shown first, an impulse passes through the broad
streaming into the theater and one hears on all sides: „Well, let´s go and have a beer then!“
and the Russian film is run off to a half empty auditorium.”
25-year-old refugee, Kyjov, left Czechoslovakia in December 1953
“The order of the screened movies was reversed recently – the Soviet movie goes first, then the
French or English one follows. It is not possible to visit only the second part of the program,
however. The ticket office is closed on time and nobody is allowed to enter the cinema hall
after the projection has started.”
Děčín, August 1953
The practice of attaching a Soviet documentary to a western movie was abruptly stopped at
the end of 1953. Even if the double-features were still screened for higher admission in the
following decades, since 1954 the same American and West-European movies that were
followed or preceded by a Soviet documentary were presented alone or together with shorts
on sport or culture. Since November 1953, the soviet newsreels Novosti Dňa were not
presented as a stand-alone part of the cinema program. Slightly liberalized atmosphere of the
“New Course” also provoked a discussion on the attractiveness of the Czechoslovak
newsreels: the existing practice was accused of being a “killjoy” that drives viewers out
from cinema hall to smoking rooms.
Conclusion:
The paper offers a snapshot focused on the distribution and exhibition practices in specific
historical conditions and the described characteristics can´t be extended to the whole era of
the Communist regime. I believe, however, that certain features of the period could be
generalized for the Stalinist era and serve at least as a basis for following research on the
cinema as a public space in the totalitarian communist regime.
At the level of distribution, the Czechoslovak state film tested a scale of practices that
would allow to release more attractive movies and to fulfill the centrally approved plan of
revenues and attendance. The textual paratexts as well as the supplementary parts of the
program were used to frame the movies or the whole programs and to equip them with a
suitable meaning. The distribution was highly centralized and the cinema managers were
able to predict which movie would be a hit with a certainty that cinema owners in the West
could only have dreamt of.
But the act of exhibition brought moments of unpredictability and uncertainty to the
cinema space. Because of the frequent power failures – a factor that I had no time to cover –
a cinema-goer could not be sure if the screening would be finished at all. The practice of
double-features elicited other instabilities, both for the exhibitors – who could not be sure by
the reaction of the audiences – and for the viewers – who did not know in which order the
movies were going to be screened. In effect, the viewer´s chance to get a distilled experience
of entertainment was blocked. The textual seam between the framing supplement and the
main feature formed a dividing line going through the social space of cinema.
If we take the cinema space as a specific kind of “frame” – as a frame which evokes a
scale of expectations for the audiences, then two kinds of concepts clashed in the Stalinist
era: the first one framed the movies by cinema space as an educational space, the second one
still conceptualized the cinema as a place of entertainment.
The under-researched public space of the cinema in the Stalinist era was intentionally
built up by the regime as a disciplined /disiplind/ place, but was in fact violated by moments of
unpredictability and uncertainty.
