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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2024
Abstract: In June 1989, The Prague Five (Pražská 5) was released in Czechoslovakia, quickly gaining cult status as a film openly treating the communist regime ironically. Despite being subversive, the film was indeed a product of the state-controlled industry. In line with existing scholarship, it might be tempting to posit perestroika as the explanatory framework for the existence of this politically daring film. This, however, was not the case. Its production was shaped not so much by Kremlin politics but by industry-level changes at Barrandov, the ambitions of key decision-makers, and the emergence of video. Stressing the necessity to assemble microhistories of individual films and production units situated within a macrohistory of Barrandov, the chapter illuminates the production culture at Barrandov towards the end of state-socialism, a period of the history of Czechoslovak cinema that still remains the least understood.
Keywords: home video, perestroika, film production, production culture and state-socialism, 1980s Czechoslovak cinema culture
The 1988 Barrandov-produced The Prague Five (Pražská 5) – a featurelength compilation of five short films – depicted a visibly drunk communist bureaucrat next to a gradually withering carnation, the most socialist of all flowers, lecturing people on the importance of progressive art and the need to incorporate young artists into socialist culture. His speech interconnected the five shorts that experiment with subject matter, form, style, and genre, and presented the poetics of five theatrical troupes that were amongst the most progressive on the 1980s Prague alternative scene. Each segment was quite distinctive: they included modern dance, a conceptual play of color, and a parody of 1950s Stalinist dramas. Together they offered an absurdist mosaic of performance art, a mockery of the parameters of socialist realism, and an unusually pointed criticism of state-socialist society. After its release in June 1989, The Prague Five (dir. Tomáš Vorel) quickly gained cult status as a film openly treating the communist regime ironically.
In line with existing scholarship on Czechoslovak cinema of the 1980s, it might be tempting to posit the impact of glasnost and perestroika as explanatory frameworks for the presence of such material on the cultural landscape of socialist Czechoslovakia.
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