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Abstract
In 1998, the Czech National Film Archive (Národní filmový archive/NFA) classified sixty-seven feature-length fiction films produced between 1930 and 1945 as generic melodramas in their volumes of Czech Feature Film (Český hraný film). This essay considers how this retrospective genre classification offers entry into understanding melodrama’s aesthetic and cultural operations in Czech cinema. The focus is less on how the NFA defined the genre, than how these volumes, in bringing melodrama into critical view, reveal important assumptions about its cultural and historical affiliations with foreign co-productions. Starting by outlining some of the problems presented by the volumes of Czech Feature Film, this essay highlights some key questions that emerge in studying the complicated relationship between Czech and German popular film genres. In particular, it focuses on melodrama’s relationship to films made during the Nazi occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, when films were necessarily co-produced with the Nazified film industry. Through a close reading and reception study of Saturday (Sobota, Václav Wasserman, 1945) this essay considers how the perception of melodrama films as light entertainment during the Nazi occupation provided yet another opportunity for these films on Czechoslovak state television during the post-1968 period of normalization.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Filmography
Holman, J.A., dir. 1943. Bláhový sen (Foolish Dream).
Sviták, Jan, dir.1934. Dokud máš maminku (While You Have a Mother).
Frič, Martin, dir. 1939. Jiný vzduch (Changing Wind).
Frič, Martin, dir. 1939. Kristián.
Krška, Václav, dir. 1953. Měsíc nad řekou (Moon Over the River).
Vorel, Tomáš, dir. 1989. Na brigade (On the Brigade).
Kachyňa, Karel, dir. 1988. Oznamuje se láskám vašim (Your Lovers are Notified).
Wasserman, Václav, dir. 1945. Sobota (Saturday).
Notes
1 An earlier version of this research appears in Rachel Schaff, “Home is Where the Heart Is: From Family to Nation in Czechoslovak Melodramas, 1930–1944.” In Central Europe (Re-)visited: A Multi-Perspective Approach to a Region, edited by Marija Wakounig and Ferdinand Kuhnel. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2015. 307–323.; Also see: Rachel Schaff, “Melodrama and Memory: Historicizing Pathos in Czech Holocaust Films” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, MN, 2018).
2 Táňa Bretyšová, ed. Česky hraný film II: 1930–1945 (Prague: Národní filmový archiv, Citation1998).; Táňa Bretyšová, ed. Česky hraný film III: 1945–1960 (Prague: Národní filmový archiv, Citation2001); Táňa Bretyšová, ed. Česky hraný film VI: 1981–1993 (Prague: Národní filmový archiv, Citation2010).
3 Rick Altman, “Reusable Packaging: Generic Products and the Recycling Process,” in Nick Browne, ed. Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, Citation1998), 35.
4 Altman, 5, 15.
5 Ivan Klimeš, “National Cinema in a Transnational Context: A Central European Experience,” Iluminace 25, no. 4 (2013), 37.
6 Klimeš, “National Cinema,” 37.
7 Furthermore, like the majority of Czech cinema, most of these melodrama films have not been subtitled or released abroad. There are few exceptions: prestige films with German-language versions such as František Čáp’s Night Butterfly (Noční motýl, 1941).
8 Christine Gledhill, “Prologue: The Reach of Melodrama,” Melodrama Unbound: Across History, Media, and National Cultures, edited by Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), xix.
9 See: Thomas Elsaesser, “Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 43–69.; Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).; Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: History and Theory, ed. Nick Browne (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 42–88.
10 Gledhill, “Prologue,” ix-xxvi.
11 Christine Gledhill, “Introduction, “Gender and Genre in Postwar Cinemas, ed. Christine Gledhill (Urbana, Chicago & Springfield: University of Illinois Press. 2012), 4.
12 Hjort, Mette. “Small Cinemas: How They Thrive and Why They Matter,” Mediascape: UCLA’s Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter Citation2011). https://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/Winter2011_SmallCinemas.pdf.
13 Pavlína Míčová, "Nanynčiny slzy v českém filmu 30. Let," Cinepur 11, no. 20 (2002): 32–33.; On melodrama’s relationship to Czech television serials: Jana Jedličková, "Lásky z temného kraje. Melodramatizace české televizní krimi," Cinepur 28, no. 123 (Citation2019): 64–67.; Kristýna Michaličková, "První republika v zajetí historie a protikladů. Kombinace televizních žánrů a jejich vliv na výslednou podobu seriálů," in Film a dějiny 6. Post-komunismus: Proměny českého historického filmu po roce 1989, eds. Luboš Ptáček and Petr Kopal (Prague: Casablanca, Citation2016), 155–169.
14 For example, see: Kevin B. Johnson, “Annexation Effects: Cultural Appropriation and the Politics of Place in Czech-German Films, 1930- 1945,” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2012); Ivan Klimeš, A Dangerous Neighborhood: German Cinema in the Czechoslovak Region, 1933–45,” in Cinema and the Swastika: The International Expansion of Third Reich Cinema, eds. Roel Vande Winkel and David Welch (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 112–129.; Petr Szczepanik, “Hollywood in Disguise: Practices of exhibition and reception of foreign films in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s,” in Cinema, Audiences and Modernity. New Perspectives on European Cinema History, eds. Daniel Biltereyst, Richard Maltby, Phillippe Meers (New York: Routledge, 2011), 170–171.
15 Szczepanik, 181.
16 Tereza Dvořáková, “Říše, Evropa, protektorát a film. Prag-Film v kontextu krystalizace a realizace nacistické filmové expanse,” Iluminace 30, no. 4 (2018), 37.
17 Ivan Klimeš, “A Dangerous Neighborhood,” 124–125.
18 Stephen Lowry, “Ideology and Excess in Nazi Melodrama: The Golden City,” New German Critique, no. 74 (Spring-Summer, 1998), 125–126.
19 Lowry, 128.
20 Patrice Petro, “Nazi Cinema at the Intersection of the Classical and the Popular,” New German Critique, no. 74 (Spring-Sumer 1998), 43.
21 Laura Heins, Nazi Film Melodrama (Urbana, Chicago, Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 10.
22 Heins, 11.
23 Christine Gledhill, “The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation,” in Home is Where the Heart Is:Studies in Melodrama and the Women’s Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 2002), 38.
24 “Central Film Rental, Distribution List, ‘Saturday,’ December 1970, Production Materials, National Film Archives Prague, Czech Republic. “Premiéry tohoto týdne ‘Sobota,’” Pressa 7, no. 14. January, 1945.; Lr, “Dnešní premiéra filmu ‘Sobota,’” Pressa, no. 8, January 1, 1945; “Filmová premiéra o dnešním manželství,” Venkov 40, no.12, January 14, 1945, 4.; Ks, “První letošní filmová premiéra,” Lidové noviny 53, no. 2, January 16, 1945, 4.
25 Šárka Gmiterková, “Kristián v montérkách. Hvězdná osobnost Oldřicha Nového mezi kulturními průmysly, produkčními systémy a politickými režimy v letech 1936–1969” (PhD diss., Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 2018), 76fn277.
26 Gmiterková, 52–53.
27 Matějček, “Sobota. Pokus o českou,” 110–111.
28 Press book for Saturday, Page 1, 1945, in Promotional Materials, National Film Archive, Prague, Czech Republic.
29 Matějček, 110–111
30 Matějček, 110–111.
31 d, “Filmová komedie na etickem podkladu,” Filmový kurýr 18, no. 34, August 25,1944, 4.
32 Lr, “Zrcadlo společnosti ve filmu ‘Sobota,’” Kinorevue 10, no. 46, September 20,1944, 363.; d, “Filmová komedie,” 4.
33 KS, “První letošní filmová premiéra,” 4.
34 Laura Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” Movie 25 (Winter 1989), 53–54.
35 Gmiterková, 54. Nový’s wife Alice was transported to the Terezín ghetto where she spent the last months of the war.
36 After the war, Adina Mandlová was faced charges in front of an Extraordinary People’s Court because she starred in German films and had publicized relationships with German men.
37 Jiří Havelka, Filmové hospodářství 1951 až 1955 (Prague: Čs. filmové nakladatelství, 1972), 307–314.; For more on “old films” see: Lukáš Skupa, “Filmy, které nestárnou: Distribuce českých meziválečných a protektoratnich filmu v letech 1945–1970” (Essay, Masarykova univerzita, 2008). I am grateful to Petr Szczepanik for pointing me to this essay.
38 For example, Hugo Haas’ 1937 adaptation of Karel Čapek’s anti-fascist play The White Disease (Bílá nemoc). O.K. “Návrat Hugo Haase,” Filmová práce 2 no. 15, April 13, 1946, 4.
39 Petr Bilík, “The Sneaky Victory of Genre: The Story of One Czech Western,” Moravian Journal of Literature and Film 5, no 2 (Fall 2014), 28.
40 “Saturday,” December 19, 1969, 412/93975, Promotional Materials, National Film Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
41 “Sobota,” December 19, 1969, 412/93975, Promotional Materials, National Film Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
42 “Sobota,” December 19, 1969, 412/93975, Promotional Materials, National Film Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
43 “Sobota,” Filmový přehled 48, 1970.
44 “Sobota.”
45 “Sobota.”
46 “Sobota.”
47 “Sobota.”
48 Týdeník Československá televize,” February 8–17, 1969, Czech Television Archives, Prague, Czech Republic.
49 Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and his TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 112.
50 Bren, 8–9.
51 Bren, 5.
52 Bren, 5.
53 Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1975), 63.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Rachel Schaff
Rachel Schaff is the Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Screen Studies at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. Her research addresses questions of moving image melodrama across various cinematic forms and national contexts as they relate to the institutionalization of Holocaust memorialization. She has published in journals such as Cinema et Cie, Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and The Spectator (with Jane M. Gaines).