Week 4 - Czech New Wave

WW2 and Czechoslovakia

Different responses to the occupation across Czech society, reflected in the narrative of Closely Observed Trains - can broadly be divided into three types of reaction:

• passive acceptance

• active acts of collaboration

Closely Observed Trains explores:

• Czechoslovakia as a pawn of larger, more powerful nations - effect on national identity

• depiction of different responses to Nazi occupation

• underlying analysis of reactions to Soviet presence and influence

• reflection of attitudinal changes in 1960s Czechoslovakia

Czech New Wave

• started in 1963

• no single manifesto - varied approaches and styles

• focused on ordinary people and lives

• with Prague Spring of 1968, movement came to an end - blacklisting, exile, recanting

The unifying factor of the New Wave style is “an idiosyncratic combination of several characteristics… including an interest in contemporary topics (often tackled with documentary authenticity)… subtle humour (often bordering on the absurd), the use of avant-garde narrative and editing techniques… and the attention to psychological detail (often better revealed in explorations of interactions within a group rather than in studies of individual protagonists)” (Diana Iordanova)

The New Wave privileged “laughter over pragmatism”.

Juxtapositions

• sex and politics

• adulthood and adolescence

• stillness and motion

Opening Sequence

• introduces a stylistic interplay between motional pictures and still photography

• Hapsburg glory vs. the Good Soldier Svejk: a popular folk antihero, lovable fool

• some critics have seen the family’s idleness as representing a stance against authority and dogma - but it could also be seen as symbolic of a greater sense of suspended animation throughout the German occupation

• ethical ambiguity