Abstract: ‘Vault films’ (‘trezorove filmy’ in Czech) is the name given to the group of Czechoslovak studio films which were taken out of circulation, left in the can and not released, or left unfinished due to the political changes in Czechoslovakia subsequent to the invasion of Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968. Recognition of their intrinsic worth at the time was such that the films were not destroyed, but instead spirited away and archived, put into hibernation to await the light of a new day. The films discussed here are All My Compatriots (1969, dir. Vojtěch Jasný; Best Director, Cannes, 1969), The Cremator (1969, dir. Juraj Herz), Larks on a String (1969, dir. Jiří Menzel; cowritten by Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal; Golden Bear, Berlin, 1990), Witchhammer (1970, dir. Otakar Vávra), The Ear (1970, dir. Karel Kachyňa), and A Case for the New Hangman (1970, dir. Pavel Juráček).

Keywords: Czech New Wave; vault films; Normalization; censorship; Restitution

The communist putsch in ‘48 took a few days. It took one night [in August 1968] packed with thousands of tanks to establish the twenty-year occupation. But changing the state film studio into a party studio took about two years. Thousands of employees, running budgets in the millions of Czech crowns, a hundred unfinished [audiovisual] materials and at least a dozen films in progress with crews in place, this could not be liquidated in a short time. There were still good, interesting, and beautiful films being made and finished; however, the majority ended up under lock and key and a militiaman's seal. Vault films – this is a special chapter in the comprehensive history of our filmmaking: hair-raising, adventurous, and I dare say risk-taking and brave.

The book which you are about or not about to read was begun originally in 1967 and 1968. […] That book, however, was not published, for reasons that do not need to be explained.