Barren land and child poverty in black and white: film still from “The Painted Bird”, the only Czech film of the last ten years to be invited to the Venice Film Festival.
Photo: IFC Films
I’ve been thinking about the state of Czech film far too often lately. I come from here, live in Prague, make films… and I can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong. There is a smell of defeat in the air that everyone notices, especially the film people themselves, but everyone ignores. But we know the truth: There are simply no good films being made in the Czech Republic at the moment.
On the surface, our small European film industry seems to be doing what it’s supposed to, with a lot of things similar to other European countries. The National Film School FAMU (Film and Television Academy of the Academy of Performing Arts), alma mater of Miloš Forman and Emir Kusturica, produces new depressed graduates every year. They make a lot of films and occasionally they are watched.
There are regular box office hits thanks to popular actors: Ondřej Vetchý and Hynek Čermák, for example, and everyone who is cast because they look so similar to them. They convey to the audience the ideal of contented working class masculinity. Anna Geislerová and Jana Plodková are almost as successful: they always play dissatisfied, somewhat simple women. Countless comedy films are made with characters like this. The national film award, “The Czech Lion,” is dutifully awarded year after year. The winners then get drunk, stumble across the red carpet on the steps of Prague’s Rudolphinum and provide fodder for the tabloids. But at the center of this spectacle there is a great emptiness.
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Contemporary Czech film is a mass of mediocre mainstream comedy and mainstream drama. The films portray romantic relationships and family life… but in a completely impersonal way. The characters are flat, even empty, and then fill scenes that screenwriters assume are just as commonplace. That suits everyone.
Nowhere is there an artistic attempt. What is missing most is a feeling that is essential to cinema, to film: real shared life experience. We produce lousy products. It’s not possible to tell about real life and human experiences in pictures. The scriptwriters try to fill their schedules with imagined “everyday experiences” rather than simply recounting their own. But that is forbidden.
Anyone who works in the Czech film industry expects nothing from it except to be paid; Not good, but you get a little something. Czech cinema produces nothing of cultural value, not even real entertainment. Both the viewers and the many investors lose out. Even the most disgusting, vulgar comedy sometimes pays off financially. The slightly better films are shown at the Karlovy Vary Festival. Only one Czech film, “The Painted Bird,” has been shown at the Venice Festival in the last ten years.
No contemporary Czech film has come close to the Czech or Czechoslovak New Wave of the 1960s. Back then, Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jan Němec went to great lengths to circumvent the censorship authorities: by focusing on small, supposedly personal stories, they were able to subversively address the issues that were really important to society. Nobody really seems to be rebelling at the moment.
Her films only exist as vague memories. At best we imitate this past and remain blind to what is happening in the world today. We are cut off from the rest of Europe, its art, its trends. And we’re kind of proud of that. Any inkling of progress and new beginnings has disappeared. The comedies use gender stereotypes and are peppered with “rape jokes” that would be unthinkable a few kilometers further west. The most successful Czech film of 2022, whose title was translated in English as “Bet on Friendship,” depicted a sexual assault…aiming for laughter from the audience. I saw him in the cinema. Luckily, hardly anyone laughed.
The red star was replaced by dollar signs after the Velvet Revolution. We are now trying to be a liberal European country. The films must be commercially successful. But we are trying to make money without having it, creating a supplicant industry. The average mainstream film is watched by no more than 30,000 people.
Our films show the Czech Republic’s shifted self-image: on the one hand, we see ourselves as part of the great, wealthy, imperial Western Europe, and on the other hand, as a poor, exploited Eastern Europe that clings to its traditions and is isolated. This is illogical and ridiculous. Of course this is the East, we just don’t admit it. “Eastern Europe” quickly sounds like an insult.
We would never admit that it would make more sense for a poorer country to strive for art, for personal, small films, instead of imitating the fat Hollywood productions with poor sets. Look at the Romanian New Wave, they know how it’s done.
There is nothing here that can be compared to Romania’s independent film. In a would-be industry that doesn’t make any money, the only way to get it is from the state. These are essentially the State Film Fund and Česká televize, the state television. Such institutions have a certain taste that you have to perfectly match. These films are about audience accumulation. Officially we have liberal freedoms, but actually it’s just another form of censorship, because the state owns the film production forces. So instead of art: popular films that, at best, make a little money. A strange historical twist.
Either the committee likes a film or it doesn’t work at all. The censorship of our communist past was more generous than today’s. At least art was financed back then, but today the state gives its money to commerce. Of course, nothing valuable can emerge from such a system. Producers of “independent” films also depend on the state. That doesn’t allow any (artistic) risk. Either the state thinks what someone is doing is too weird, or the higher-earning film companies make the same judgment. Nobody rebels.
State film funding is partly to blame. But in principle you don’t have to condemn them. This is the case everywhere in Eastern Europe. But for some reason it doesn’t work here. Maybe that’s due to the amalgam of censorship-hungry official control and an openly capitalist machine that wants to make money.
There have been attempts to breathe life back into this cinematic corpse. A young generation of filmmakers is rising. Manifestos promise more personal films and declare themselves a movement: “New Czech Intimacy.” Unfortunately, all of this has so far only led to obscure productions, neutered sex dramas, one might say, with actors from the National Theater and money from state television. Under no circumstances should female genitalia be shown, as this could upset investors and the Ministry of Culture. For television, nudity is hidden behind filters.
Everything ends up leading to a strange need for self-censorship. If you want to make money, you can’t take any risks. You adapt the taste that the donors assumed the “Czech viewer” would have. This abstract, imaginary figure, the “Czech spectator,” that we are supposed to follow, does not want to see anything new. The truth is that people are hungry for renewal, but we don’t care. There is always hope for art, but at the moment art in cinema is not up for debate in the Czech Republic.
The author, born in 2000, recently completed his directing studies at the Prague Film University. With his final film “Jubilee” he is waiting for the festival season. Translated from English by Vincent Sauer.
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