Masa made his debut as the director of "Wandering" ("Bloudeni" - 1965), a sharply defined story of the conflict between generations projected against the backdrop of the post-Stalinist period. Shortly thereafter, in "Hotel for Strangers" ("Hotel pro cizince" - 1966), he created, in an 'art nouveau' style, a picture of an ivory-tower world that kills a poet who has come seeking sensitivity and truth. This metaphor was replaced by direct political reflection in his next film, "Looking Back" ("Ohlednuti" - 1968), an attempt at finally integrating the experiences of the last 25 years.
Masa's metaphor about the death of the poet seemed to take up the theme that was expressed earlier on the stage in Ivan Klima's play, "The Castle". The sixties in Czechoslovakia had become a period of renaissance for the legitimate theatre, which found - for the first time since the Capek brothers - true dramatists in Milan Kundera, Vaclav Havel, Josef Topol, Ivan Klima, and others. The stage became an important platform for the intellectual destruction of myths and taboos, and at the same time a focus and a departure point for cultural ferment, dominated by the Prague Theatre Behind the Arch (Otomar Krejca), Theatre on the Ballustrade (Jan Grossman), Semafor Theatre (Jiri Slitr, Jiri Suchy), Drama Club, and others.
Aside from the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia was the only country in which the belated de-Stalinization brought with it an exceptional flowering of national literature, bringing to light such extraordinary talents as Fuks, Hrabal, Kundera, Linhartova, Paral, Skvorecky, Vaculik, and, later, Sotola and others. The symbiosis of theatre, literature, art, and music with film, in a tense period of anxiety and searching, and in the inspiring uniqueness of the setting that was Prague, indisputably represented an important stimulus to the development of film culture. In many ways it was a repeat of what had happened in the thirties.
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