Subversion in Eastern Europe: Aesopian Metaphors - (By Amos Vogel - 1974) - Movies - http://maxpages.com/czechcinema/Subversion_in_Eastern

The failure to extend the proletarian revolution to the West and the subsequent degeneration of the Russian revolution has tragically transformed the political system that promised man the widest possible freedom into the world's most efficient totalitarian regime. In the cinema as elsewhere, the the state's complete control over the means of production and of communication seems effectively to preclude opposition or dissent. Yet the spirit of freedom surreptitiously reemerges, particularly among the young of each new generation. Symptomatically, just because the spirit of freedom is directed towards the extension of democracy and, in the arts, towards the flowering of different aesthetic tendencies, it appears counter-revolutionary to the regime (which thereby unintentionally defines itself in action) and new repressive measures are instituted, to which the new pioneers respond with new tactics. This constant state of tension between creative artist and government bureaucracy is basic to the eastern societies from Eisenstein in Russia to Schorm in Czechoslovakia, Skolimowski in Poland, and Makavejev in Yugoslavia. Unable to pose questions head-on, the artist is forced into allegory, metaphor, and indirectness - secret communications to be decoded by the viewer. These courageous filmmakers are moralists of their society, reminiscent of Diderot and the "Encyclopedistes"; for where politics is inhibited, art tends to assume its function, and form and style - not merely content - become ideologically charged. In this sense, while propaganda films are lacking in Eastern Europe, political films are not.
Individual works involving lesser or greater dissent can be found at infrequent intervals in each of the national cinemas of the East. But the emergence of the entire 'school' has so far been limited to the short-lived Polish experience of the Gomulka years of the fifties and the equally brilliant Czech film renaissance, immediately before and under Dubcek. Though now only a glowing moment of history - it was destroyed by the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia - this latter movement and its works stand as astonishing revelations of the hidden trends within the so-called monolithic ideological structures of the East.
To Western eyes, this movement offered a challenge: the most difficult film to find in Prague was a Communist propaganda film and the easiest, a humanistic work in the idiom of modern cinema. The 'socialist realism' of the past - a sentimentalized falsification of reality - had been superseded by an attempt to confront truth and uncertainty, experience and doubt. These Czech films deal with alienation, with anti-heroes and the corruption, by terror, of victims as well as executioners. Devoid of 'official' ideology, they are filled with unorthodox compassion for people as they are and no longer, as in Stalin's times, as they should be.
This astonishing, tightly knit group of young filmmakers represented the values of the first post-Stalinist generation. It was striking to note how similar their views were to those of the West's rebellious youth, which, from a different starting point, had also become engaged in a search, without illusions, for possible ideals and provisional truths. It seemed that the world was perversely backing into an enforced brotherhood, which would universalize such problems as individual freedom in a bureaucratic society, estrangement between generations, the failure of dogmatic ideologies, and eternal confrontations of imperfect innocence as against the corruption of so-called maturity.
Two complimentary tendencies dominated the young Czech cinema. The realist camp (similar to the Italian neorealists and 'cinema verite') concentrated on the significance of the insignificant, using non-professionals and actual locales for greater authenticity. Unlike the Italians, however, the Czech realists (Forman, Passer, Menzel) seemed less ideological, sentimental, and heroic. In providing a truth and spontaneity too long frowned upon, their films were as radical as the elaborate creations of the allegorical-symbolist wing.
This camp (represented by Schorm, Nemec, Masa, Juracek, and Vera Chytilova) was far more cerebral; its scenarios were careful intellectual constructions; its settings and visual styles intentionally artificial; its tone oblique, suffused with existentialism. There was less of the smiling optimism of the neorealist camp; a more sombre, even pessimistic, mood obtained. Stylistically, they tended to be allegorical, symbolist, or even 'absurd'; touches of Bunuel, Fellini, Bergman abounded, and the possibility of an underlying complexity too dense to be unravelled was hinted at.
However, it was the influence of Kafka that loomed largest. This modern prophet of ambiguity, unidentifiable nightmare, and sublime intimations of limited hope had finally become inescapable. The property of the world, he was at last accepted in his own country as well. Following his ideological rehabilitation at the end of the Stalin era, his works instantly sold out and entered the intellectual and conceptual framework of the new generation.
The Dubcek era, by modifying an artificial isolation from abroad of seventeen years, recontructed the link with Czechoslovakia's unique past, which predisposes the country toward the most modern cultural tendencies. Situated at the centre of an age-old, warring continent, always a minority within larger empires, this unfortunate country has perhaps been more frequently subjugated or 'liberated' than any other European nation, as well as subjected to the most sophisticated cultural influences. Surrealism, Cubism, Dadaism were at home under Masaryk and Benes. Ironically, Hitler forced into Prague an additional group of outstanding emigre exponents of 'decadent' modern art, and the isolation from the world under Hitler and Stalin led to an advantageous amalgamation of leading Czech elements in theatre, film, painting, and literature into one common milieu, the inevitable nucleus for the forces of cultural liberalization.
Despite the Russian destruction of this movement - all the directors were forced out of the industry or into exile - it has left its mark and, together with the Polish film renaissance under Gomulka (Polanski, Borowczyk, Lenica, Skolimowski, Wajda, Kawalerowicz, Has, and Munk), has set standards of thematic and aesthetic daring that have become prototypes for filmmakers in the other Eastern countries as well. In vain does one now look for 'socialist realism', 'positive heroes', or paeans to tractors; instead, in their best works, there is a painful confrontation of the basic questions of human freedom under a collectivized regime without democratic controls, a positive scepticism and rejection of hypocrisy which reveal a struggle for new values and new life styles. These films are not 'counter-revolutionary', but rather attempt to clarify what the Czech reform movement used as its slogan; 'socialism with a human face'. They prove that arrogantly exercised power, alienation, and the corruption of both the individual and society are as rife in the East as in the West, and that the aspirations of the most progressive youth in both blocs are identical: a more equitable society, yet one that preserves, indeed extends, the best democratic traditions of the West.
(Copyright-Random House Inc., New York)

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