Army Film and the Avant Garde

Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

Alice Lovejoy

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253014832
• eBook ISBN: 9780253014931
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

A history of the Czechoslovakian military's connection to some of the nation's most innovative and subversive cinema.
During the 1968 Prague Spring and the Soviet-led invasion and occupation that followed, Czechoslovakia's Army Film studio was responsible for some of the most politically subversive and aesthetically innovative films of the period. Although the studio is remembered primarily as a producer of propaganda and training films, some notable New Wave directors began their careers there, making films that considerably enrich the history of that movement. Alice Lovejoy examines the institutional and governmental roots of postwar Czechoslovak cinema and provides evidence that links the Army Film studio to Czechoslovakia's art cinema. By tracing the studio's unique institutional dimensions and production culture, Lovejoy explores the ways in which the "military avant-garde" engaged in dialogue with a range of global film practices and cultures.
(The print version of the book includes a DVD featuring sixteenth short films produced by the Czechoslovak Ministry of Defense. The additional media files are not available on the eBook.)
"Alice Lovejoy's revelatory study of the cinema culture wrought by the Czechoslovak Army Film studio is a cause for celebration among both cinephiles and media scholars. . . . Lovejoy's curatorial enterprise brings these fascinating films to us for fresh examination. Seeing these artful army films nearly half a century later opens our eyes to work that requires us to reassess what we thought we knew about documentary, new waves, and world cinema itself." —Dan Streible, New York University
"Lovejoy restores these sometimes funny, sometimes poignant and always innovative films to their proper place in film history, while explaining the unique cultural politics that allowed them to blossom beneath the noses of the Stalinist government." —Tom Gunning, University of Chicago
"Filled with surprises for readers who thought they knew their Czech film history, this insightful book refutes many received ideas about Eastern European cultural politics during the Cold War and sketches a complex and nuanced relationship between artists and the socialist state." —Rick Prelinger, UC Santa Cruz

1

A Deep and Fruitful Tradition: Jiří Jeníček, the Film Group, and Cinema Culture of the 1930s

“ON THE GOALS AND RESPONSIBILITIES of Military Film,” a 1937 article by Czechoslovak Army filmmaker Jiří Jeníček, does not open—as one might imagine from its staid title—with the history of battles or proclamations about duty to country and flag. Instead, it begins with a quote from Béla Balázs’s 1924 Visible Man: “Film is the popular art of our century.”¹ This quote serves as pretext for Jeníček’s contention: that militaries throughout the world have long been a central source for new understandings and uses of cinema. “A good eight years before Balázs,” he writes,

during the last part of the World War, soldiers recognized the advantages that film can bring to their work, sensing that it had all the characteristics of a popular communication medium. They did not, of course, place film as high on the hierarchical ladder as Balázs, but they recognized its exceptional importance for defense at a time when it was still considered a peripheral … entertainment; when a man of average education blushed if pressed to acknowledge that he spent his evenings at the biograph.²

This “recognition” was not, he notes, “sheer chance.” Instead, it was the “result of a deep and fruitful tradition to which the names of numerous soldiers speak: for instance, the French Army officer Nicéphore Niépce, one of the inventors of photography; or general Uchatius [Franz von Uchatius], the inventor of the projection stroboscope …, who contributed very honorably to the history not only of military photography and cinema, but also of photography and cinema more generally.” This history of innovation in visual technology, in Jeníček’s estimation, is linked to military innovations in cinema’s applications, of which he highlights three: propaganda, education, and technical.

If Jeníček’s characterization of the military as cinema’s advance guard prefigured by a half-century Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler’s media theories, it also described Czechoslovak military cinema at this moment. In the 1930s, the Army’s Film Group (Filmová skupina), with Jeníček at its helm, was a vanguard for Czechoslovak film: a space in which new social, political, formal, and institutional understandings of cinema were discussed, tested, and put into practice. As such, Jeníček’s invocation of contemporary film criticism was doubly fitting, for this process was integrally connected to “civilian” film culture. The Group, indeed, brought together several of the interwar Czechoslovak figures most deeply and practically engaged in articulating a conception of cinema that extended beyond its popular associations with commerce or entertainment. Some of these figures were members of the country’s cultural avant garde: musician, critic, and dramatist E. F. Burian; filmmaker Jiří Lehovec. Others, like diplomat Jindřich Elbl, were government officials. By the time Jeníček published his essay, the Film Group was on the cusp of being recognized both for these conceptual contributions and for, as film critic Antonín Navrátil would observe years later, its role as an “incubator of talent”: an institution that allowed young filmmakers to hone their skills through practice.³ This identity—which recognized Czechoslovak military cinema as a site of experimentation and education—would define Army filmmaking in the country for decades to come.

PROPAGANDA AND MYTH

“There are,” Jeníček observes in his essay, “as many opinions and viewpoints on the function of military film as there are armies”—and in Czechoslovakia, military film’s central “function” was “historical propaganda.” This corresponded to long-standing cultural practices in Czechoslovakia, to whose very existence—as historian Andrea Orzoff has detailed—propaganda was critical. Long before 1919, when the new, democratic state was established by the Treaty of Saint-Germain, Orzoff writes, the country’s founders “decided that international and domestic propaganda would have to be intense complementary efforts for the postwar Czechoslovak state. The world, particularly the Great Powers, had to be taught about this new parliamentary democracy at Europe’s heart.”⁴

These founders—chief among them philosopher Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and sociologist Edvard Beneš (Czechoslovakia’s first and second presidents, respectively)—led the process in which the First Czechoslovak Republic was carved from the former Hapsburg Monarchy, which, for centuries, had spanned much of Eastern and Central Europe. The republic was correspondingly diverse. At its west were the Czech lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia), which together had possessed two thirds of Hapsburg industry.⁵ At the north, the mining region of Silesia bordered and shared population with Poland, while to its east were the largely agrarian and Catholic Slovak lands, historically part of Hungary. To Slovakia’s east lay poor, religious, and rural Subcarpathian Ruthenia, formerly a Hungarian territory and today part of Ukraine.

The new state’s heterogeneity was at once an advantage—with its mixture of developed industry, rich agricultural territory, and (in the Czech lands) literate, educated population—and a liability. While in the 1921 and 1930 censuses, roughly 65 percent of the state’s population was identified as “Czechoslovak” (a term that itself comprised distinct populations and identities), a fifth of Slovakia’s interwar population was ethnically Magyar (Hungarian), and a full third of Bohemia’s interwar population German. Jews, Poles, and Ruthenians also made up a considerable part of Czechoslovak society.⁶ Despite the practical fluidity between many of these identities, their populations were the subject of claims by Czechoslovakia’s neighbors—primarily Hungary and, after the National Socialist (Nazi) Party came to power, Germany.⁷ Moreover, the republic’s official “national” culture proved in practice to be primarily Czech, leaving little room for the expression of other identities.⁸

Thus, while World War I propaganda had sought to justify Czechoslovakia’s creation, propaganda remained a critical governmental tool after the war, when it helped present a coherent state identity to publics at home and abroad. This identity centered on a Czech national narrative, or “myth,” dating to the nineteenth-century “National Awakening,” when artists and intellectuals canonized a series of “national” personalities, works, and events—the fourteenth-century monk Dalimil’s chronicle of the Czech people, religious reformer Jan Hus, and folk tales and proverbs.⁹ Among the myth’s central themes were the Czech language’s function as a bearer of national identity; the characterization of Germans as, in historian Jiří Rak’s words, an “ancestral enemy”; and most important, a vision of the country as exceptional among its neighbors for its deep-seated democratic values.¹⁰

As Orzoff describes, this “myth” was disseminated through a range of media (print, radio, the graphic arts, lectures) whose production and circulation the Czechoslovak Ministry of Foreign Affairs coordinated, but that was typically produced in collaboration with private institutions: Masaryk and Beneš, she writes, believed that “propaganda and cultural diplomacy were more effective when the state’s hand was hidden.”¹¹ Until the early 1930s, however, the Czechoslovak government limited its involvement with cinema. Pavel Zeman attributes this to the political elite’s mistrust of new media and to its anxieties about foreign perceptions of the state’s identity as a democracy (especially as cinema was nationalized in the Soviet Union, Italy, and Germany).¹² Governmental engagement in Czechoslovak cinema during the 1920s was thus largely limited to economic concerns (the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Business managed film import and export and helped “cultivate” the domestic film industry) and censorship (managed by the Ministry of Interior), mirroring cinema’s status in other interwar liberal democracies.¹³

The Ministry of Defense, however, was an exception to this rule and, throughout the interwar period, maintained its own production facilities and budget in order to support the military’s unique needs for film and to ensure military secrecy.¹⁴ Czechoslovak military cinema, in fact, effectively predated the First Republic itself, as the Czechoslovak Legions, volunteer forces that fought in World War I alongside the French, Italian, and Russian armies, had been heavily involved in filmmaking throughout the war.¹⁵ Here, they performed a function similar to that of Czechoslovakia’s World War I propaganda in other media, giving discursive shape to a state that did not yet exist.

For the first few years after the war, military filmmaking remained the province of former legionnaires, among them Karel Fiala, who led the Army’s Photographic and Cinematic Division in Slovakia (where fighting against Béla Kun’s Hungarian Red Army had just ended), making actuality films and assisting with Czechoslovakia’s paternalistic “assimilation” of Slovaks.¹⁶ In 1921, the film and photographic group was incorporated into the Ministry of Defense’s Investigative and Experimental Division (Výzkumný a zkušební ústav), where it added films on military technical, industrial, and other subjects to its long-standing patriotic repertoire. An October 27, 1923, review in the daily Národní listy (National Papers), for instance, describes a screening of military films that day (timed, as many such screenings were, to coincide with Czechoslovakia’s independence day, October 28) that included footage from the Army’s training maneuvers of that year, showing the “life of a soldier, his training and military preparation” and various military athletic competitions.¹⁷

When, in 1925, the group was transferred once again—this time, to the General Staff’s Training Division (Oddělení branné výchovy) and its Military Technical Institute (Vojenský technický ústav)—its production expanded to encompass, among others, nature and promotional films.¹⁸ In 1930, it began producing a newsreel, Military Bulletin (Vojenský zpravodaj). And late in the 1920s, the Ministry of Defense produced three fiction features, all directed by Vladimír Studecký: the 1927 melodrama Slavia L-Brox (A Pilot’s Romance) (Slavia L-Brox [Románek letcův]), the 1929 spy film Mountain Calling SOS (Horské volání S.O.S.), and the 1928 For the Czechoslovak State (Za československý stát), which, with its Legionnaire topic and title, returned the Group to its earliest intentions and institutional roots.¹⁹

In 1929, Jeníček—a career soldier since 1916—was transferred to Prague and to what was then known as the Film Group. Under his leadership, Czechoslovak military cinema further developed its newsreel, instructional, and propaganda production, modes that were central to Jeníček’s understanding of military cinema.²⁰ Jeníček’s instructional films ranged in form and approach, from expository to reportage to popular-scientific. Some focused on behavior and morale, employing fiction as a mode of instruction, among them the 1934 Morning in the Barracks (Ráno v kasárnách), a series of slapstick vignettes demonstrating proper conduct on military bases. (The intertitle “Rule: the alarm clock signals to the men to wake up and get ready for the day’s work” is followed by a scene in which soldiers douse their oversleeping comrade with a bucket of water.)

Although, like their precursors, instructional films often had patriotic undertones (a night guard in Morning in the Barracks’ first vignette contentedly reads Božena Němcová’s The Grandmother [Babička], a literary classic of the Czech National Awakening), elements of the Czechoslovak “myth” were most prominent in the Film Group’s propaganda. The 1935 Our Soldiers (Naši vojáci), for instance, opens with the title

Remember the words of Karel Havlíček Borovský: “The soldier’s vocation is beautiful and honorable when he puts his life at stake for his countrymen, when he endures discomfort for our many-hued homeland, when he guards the borders of the land, so that it may peacefully work.” This is the spirit of the Czechoslovak soldier’s work!²¹

The film that follows sketches the “life cyle” of a Czechoslovak soldier through a compilation of scenes from military actualities and instructional films (youth at a scout camp, conscription, daily life on the military base, the work of different units), ending triumphantly, with a military parade.

DEPRESSION, SOUND, AND NATION

The Film Group’s development in the 1930s was the result not only of Jeníček’s leadership but also of political and cultural shifts that created synergy between the Czechoslovak state’s economic interest in cinema and the national interests of its propaganda in other media. Two events of the late 1920s and early 1930s precipitated these changes: the Great Depression and the adve...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation
• Introduction
• 1. A Deep and Fruitful Tradition: Jiří Jeníček, the Film Group, and Cinema Culture of the 1930s
• 2. All of Film Is an Experiment: Army Documentary, Postwar Reconstruction, and Building Socialism
• 3. The Crooked Mirror: Pedagogy and Art in Army Instructional Films
• 4. Every Young Man: Reinventing Army Film
• 5. A Military Avant Garde: Documentary and the Prague Spring
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography
• Index
• Plates