"Sunshine in a Net" - (By Mira & Antonin J. Liehm - 1977) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/1_Sunshine_in_a

'As long as I'm here, this anti-socialist art will not be distributed!' This statement was made in the spring of 1963 by Karol Bacilek, First Secretary of the Communist Party of Slovakia, and erstwhile Mininster of State Security in the early fifties. In response to this statement, the Film Journalist's Club organized in Prague a special premiere showing of Stefan Uher's film, "Sunshine in a Net" ("Slnko V Sieti" - 1962). At just about the same time, a commision composed of political leaders, historians, and political scientists was meeting in Prague. The resolutions passed by this commission resulted in the rehabilitation of the so-called 'Slovak nationalists', some of whom had been condemned to life imprisonment in the witch-hunt trials of the fifties. (One of these 'nationalists', Gustav Husak, succeeded Dubcek as First Secretary of the Communist Party after Soviet troops occupied Czechoslovakia in 1968.) Karol Bacilek soon vanished into political limbo, to be replaced by the unknown Alexander Dubcek as the head of the Slovak Communist Party. That year only Czechoslovakia, among all the industrial countries in the world, showed a drop in national income. The total drop was 2.2 percent, industrial production dropping 0.7 percent (agricultural production fell 0.4 percent between 1961 and 1965), and productivity 1.4 percent. What had been the foundation of Czechoslovakia's political stability since 1956 was in an unprecedented shambles.
The history of "Sunshine in a Net" aptly illustrates the direct link between culture and politics in another land where the Spectator was simultaneously the wielder of absolute power and the embodiment of absolute authority. A shock to political power brought about a crisis of authority, and art- above all film- emerged from this crisis into open conflict with the established cultural policy.
"Sunshine in a Net" was entirely different from practically everything that preceded it. The script rejected the axioms about dramatic structure, turning instead to the inner life of its characters, the complex problems of their intercommunication- the hero's mother, for example, is blind, which forces her to perceive reality through the eyes of others. Uher acted with utter freedom, within the limits of the real world; he cast off all political opportunism and showed on the screen some of the aspects of the true face of economic reality. Stanislav Szomolanyi's camerawork went on to contribute an entirely new dimension of almost surreal lyricism.
Thus "Sunshine in a Net" became the symbol of the upsurge that at that time was ripening on all fronts. Almost simultaneously with the opening of "Sunshine in a Net", a program of films directed by Vera Chytilova finally was distributed, after endless delays. The two medium-length films were shown under the title "There's a Bag of Fleas at the Ceiling" ("U Stropu Je Pytel Blech - 1962). In the style of cinema verite, and influenced by American underground films, the films were on one hand a personal contemplation of the lot of women- "The Ceiling"- a complete departure from past themes, and on the other hand, A sharply-honed, moralizing, sarcastic tract against the hypocrisy of educators in a girl's apprentice dormitory- "A Bag of Fleas" ("Pytel Blech"). Shortly thereafter, Chytilova concluded work on her first feature film, "Something Different" ("O Necem Jinem" - 1963), one of the best films made in Czechoslovakia in the sixties. In it, she remained true to the cinema verite method, but she introduced a new philosophical note into Czech film by showing the parallelism of success and failure, the relativity of two totally dissimilar 'women's destinies'.
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