Eastern European Cinema

I

Introduction

Eastern European Cinema, historical development of the cinema in Eastern and Central Europe. Between the end of World War II and the collapse of Communist regimes throughout Europe and the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in the late 1980s, cinema played an unusually important role in the countries of Eastern Europe. Film-makers who were expected to produce official propaganda or bland entertainment turned instead to highly personal and experimental themes. Their work gave expression to a rising tide of dissent, especially among the young, and helped create worldwide sympathy for the challenges to authoritarian rule that erupted periodically from the 1950s onward.

II

History

The history of film production in pre-war Eastern Europe had long been associated with struggles to proclaim national identity. Almost all the early films made in Bulgaria, the future Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and the Balkans (later Yugoslavia) had a political or cultural significance arising from the long history of domination by the sprawling Russian, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman empires. The first film shot by the Hungarians, for instance, was a record of traditional dancing in 1901, commissioned to illustrate public education lectures. The Macedonian Milton Manaki documented Balkan life from 1905 (and was honoured in the Greek director Theodoros Angelopoulos’s 1994 film Ulysses’s Gaze). The first Bulgarian fictional film, made in 1914, just six years after the country achieved independence, was proudly entitled Bulgarians Are Gallant. Among the film-makers who produced rousing propaganda during the short-lived Hungarian Communist republic of 1919 were the future director of Casablanca (1942), Michael Curtiz, and Alexander Korda, who revitalized British cinema in the 1930s.

By the 1920s, studios had been established in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. Professional film-makers began to emerge and local stars appeared—some of whom, such as Pola Negri (from Poland), Vilma Banky (from Hungary), and Hedy Lamarr (Vienna-born Czech star), would gain international fame—whose popularity helped these fledgling national industries compete with the growing domination of world cinema by Hollywood. Avant-garde movements in several countries took a more independent line: the Serbo-Croat Zenith group (1920-1926) saw film as a synthesis of modern art movements, while the 1930s Polish START group argued for realist, socially useful films. Despite some striking successes, especially in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, World War II halted most film-making as the whole region was occupied by Nazi Germany, although the first Serbian talkie, Innocence Unprotected, was made clandestinely in 1940 (and affectionately recalled in the Yugoslav Dušan Makavejev’s film of the same name in 1968).

III

Post-War Years

After the war, between 1945 and 1950, Eastern Europe came under a new domination within the Soviet sphere of influence, which now included the eastern part of a divided Germany. In the early years of Communist rule, the newly nationalized film industries of Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia largely followed the Soviet pattern. As well as providing a basic diet of wholesome entertainment untainted by Western values, they promoted an official revolutionary ideology, often dwelling on the struggle against German occupation, as in the celebrated Polish trilogy by Andrzej Wajda, A Generation, Kanal, and Ashes and Diamonds (1954-1958), or evoking heroic liberators of the past, as in the 1954 Soviet-Albanian co-production The Great Warrior Skanderbeg.

Soviet films acquired a new export market as they became the common currency of the Eastern bloc. Co-productions helped to weld together what amounted to a virtually self-contained system that allowed in only a few, carefully selected films from Western Europe and the United States. Among the system’s widely admired features were its emphasis on training, with outstanding film schools created in Prague and at Łódź in Poland, and its encouragement of sophisticated, often satirical animation, which flourished especially in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland.

The importance granted to cinema by Soviet tradition gave it a power that could subvert, as well as follow, the party line. After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the first steps by Khrushchev towards liberalizing the Soviet system, film became the harbinger of new aspirations within the Communist world. A generation of young film-makers rejected heroic themes and monumental imagery to focus on ordinary lives and contemporary issues. In Poland, the Roman Polanski film Knife in the Water (1962) and Jerzy Skolimowski’s Rysopsis (1964) introduced a new deadpan existential mood, while in Czechoslovakia, the New Wave generation produced generally warmer, more comic social microcosms in the Milos Forman film A Blonde in Love (1965) and Jiří Menzel‘s Closely Observed Trains (1966), although a more experimental vein was apparent in Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night (1964) and Verá Chytilová’s Daisies (1966). Even the relatively undeveloped cinemas of Bulgaria and Romania began to produce fresh new work. From Hungary, Miklós Jancsó’s sparse yet intricately choreographed epics, starting with The Round-Up (1965), attracted wide attention, as did the witty, increasingly erotic collage films of Makavejev, culminating in the international scandal of his WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971).

Repression at home silenced many of these film-makers by the end of the 1960s, or drove them into exile, even as Western film and television began to show traces of, especially, Czech influence. However, the climax of Eastern European cinema’s public role came in the late 1970s as Polish film-makers laid bare the political and moral turmoil within their society. Wajda’s trilogy Man of Marble (1977), Without Anaesthetic (1979), and Man of Iron (1981) coincided with the rise of the Solidarity movement and attracted international support. Censorship, however, continued to block the release of many films and forced film-makers to look for the greater security of foreign co-production deals. Wajda’s Danton (1982) starred Gérard Depardieu and received French state subsidy. After the success of his Mephisto (1981), about a leading German actor of the inter-war years involved with the Nazis, the Hungarian István Szabó found willing foreign partners for subsequent films such as Colonel Redl (1984), Hunussen (1989), and his thoroughly international story of the opera world, Meeting Venus (1991), produced by David Puttnam.

Television, already a major financier of Western European cinema, entered the picture in 1988 when the Krzysztof Kieślowski ten-part series Decalogue (The Ten Commandments), a dramatized study of contemporary morality originally made for Polish television, triumphed at the Venice Film Festival in 1989 and went on to appear in cinemas around the world. This success led to the “Trois Couleurs” (“Three Colours”) trilogy, Bleu, Blanc, and Rouge (1993-1994; Blue, White, and Red), largely French-produced, but retaining Kieślowski’s distinctively Polish sensibility, its basic pessimism shot through with flashes of wit and rapture, and widely regarded as the masterpiece of recent European cinema. The Czech Surrealist animator, Jan Švankmajer, has also used his critical reputation in the West to gain foreign funding for features based on savagely subversive treatments of classical subjects, including Alice (1988) and Faust (1994). Another Eastern European film-maker who has had to learn how to survive after the collapse of Communism, and a civil war that has destroyed his country, is the Bosnian Emir Kusturica. A graduate of the Prague Film School in the 1970s, Kusturica won the Cannes Festival Palme d’Or for his second film When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and again for his surreal epic of Yugoslavia’s post-war mythology, Underground, in 1995 (which has also appeared on television as a mini-series).

IV

The Future of Eastern European Cinema

Throughout Eastern Europe, indigenous film-making now faces the same problems as in Western Europe: limited state funding, soaring production costs, and difficulty in getting cinema exposure because of the pressure of American imports. Television and home video have become vital allies in helping to keep national production alive, while a number of Eastern European countries are in the process of joining pan-European film and media support agencies such as Eurimages and the MEDIA programme. (See also Russian Cinema.)