Eastern Europe, 1955 - 1971 - (By Michael Jon Stoil - 1974) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/1_Eastern_Europe_1955_To

Despite almost thirty years of Communist control, the cinema is one of the most important of all the arts for the intelligentsia of Eastern Europe. The film directors of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia are today considered among the finest in the field. In accordance with the reality of cultural independence, each of the Eastern European states has created its own 'school' of film-making. The three eldest of these 'schools' are similar in their pre-war traditions and in their interest in depicting the problems of socialist society or offering the alternative values of the past. In effect, the cinema in Eastern Europe has developed into a means of intellectual criticism of the Soviet-inspired status quo.
This was not true during the bleak years immediately after the war. The economic hardships in Eastern Europe all but destroyed the film industries of Czechoslovakia and Hungary, but these were resurrected in the Soviet model. New industries were created in Yugoslavia, Rumania, Bulgaria and ultimately, Albania, with the aid of Soviet technical and ideological experts. This aid was a mixed blessing, particularly for the three countries with long-established film-making traditions. In the words of Czech film critic A. J. Liehm, 'the rigidity of the Stalinist system, the schematicism and vulgarity of Zhdanov "aesthetics"' was imposed on the film industry. As Stalinism gave way to de-Stalinization in 1955-56, the regimes in Eastern Europe began to give more freedom in making films according to the preferences of the directors. Although controls have been reimposed from time to time in almost all of the countries involved, in general the trend, until recently, has been towards liberation.
Several administrative factors are involved in the reasons behind the cinema's ability to maintain some of its creativity and independence in Eastern Europe and the corresponding failure in the Soviet Union. Soviet film-making was handicapped almost from birth by the 'Lenin proportion'. Although the Lenin proportion was too vague to be put into practice, it had the indirect effect of limiting entertainment films to very frivolous or classical works. At the same time, it encouraged the Soviet film studios to produce scores of propaganda films whose entertainment value was nil. The studios of Eastern Europe were never subjected to the 'guidance' of the Lenin proportion, even during the bleakest days of the industry in 1948-55, and did not have to work under this handicap.
A second factor was the contrast between twenty-five years of Stalinist socialist ideological control in the U.S.S.R. and the much briefer period of Stalinism in Eastern Europe. Unlike Soviet directors, film-makers in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had an opportunity to see American and British films without ideologically-motivated editing. This gave the directors of Eastern Europe a basis for comparison which the Soviet directors lacked. The personnel purges which were linked to ideological control in the Soviet Union also occurred in Eastern Europe, but none of these was as severe as the original model. At least, none decimated the national studios as thoroughly as the combined effects of the Soviet purges of the 30's and late 40's. Many of the Eastern European directors of the pre-war cinema were able to survive the Stalinist period, continuing their influence as artists and teachers to the present day.
Eastern Europe, like the Soviet Union, experienced severe cutbacks in feature production in those nations where a film industry had been established before the war. Poland, for example, produced only eighteen features from 1950 through 1955. The reasons for this low output were partly political but largely economic. The new generation graduating from the instruction of experienced pre-war directors in Lodz, Budapest and Prague were encouraged to use their creative energies on short films. They compiled, knowing that they would eventually be permitted to expand into feature film-making. This explains the high quality of 'shorts' and comparatively inexpensive animated films produced in Eastern Europe since the early 1950's. It also accounts, in part, for the sudden emergence of major young film directors throughout Eastern Europe in 1960-1961, when budgets allowed for expansion of the local film industries.
(Copyright - Michael Jon Stoil)

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