‘Veterans’ and ‘Dilettantes’: Film Production Culture vis-a-vis Top-Down Political Changes, 1945–1962
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| Year of publication | 2015 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | Methodologically, this essay is inspired by Janet Staiger's conceptualization of the Hollywood Mode of Production, while also building on my own work on the 'State-socialist Mode of Production', which is to say the management system and division of labor utilized in Czechoslovakia and the other former socialist countries of East-Central Europe. This industrial perspective is combined with a critical cultural analysis inspired by anthropologically-based studies of film 'production cultures' (John T. Caldwell) and communities that utilizes diverse informal sources, such as oral history and (auto)biographies. It looks at how the top-down political and cultural reforms of the Czech film production system between 1948 and 1962 interfered with production routines and hierarchies of the local production culture, i.e. the lived realities of the professional communities. Two examples of failed top-down reorganizations that affected daily production routines are used as symptomatic cases, the first one 'spatial', the second one 'temporal': first, an experiment that attempted to change the Barrandov studios into an industrial factory integrating all production personnel in one place; and second, a project to forge a new generation of communist, or 'proletarian' filmmakers to replace the old 'veterans', who were supposedly corrupted by bourgeois ideology of the ‘immoral’ film world. The failures of the top-down reorganizations were due to the passive resistance of the filmmaking community. Both conflicts pushed the community to explicitly articulate its values of professionalism and creative labour (e.g., the so-called filmic qualities and dramatic structure of the script versus dogmatic directives of the socialist realism) in order to differentiate themselves from the young radicals and 'dilettantes'. |
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