A city of cinema
From the very beginning of cinema, Prague has been a character in its own right: The Student of Prague (Stellan Rye and Paul Wegener, 1913), a German silent horror film, explores the fantastic aspects of the city, from the Daliborka Tower and the famous Golden Lane, linked to memories of medieval alchemists, to Queen Anne's Belvedere. Conversely, Night has Eyes (Innemann, 1928), commissioned by an electricity company, offers a night portrait of an illuminated city, still magical, but now fully integrated into modernity. The feature films of the period have left little trace in the cinematic canon, with the possible exception of Gustav Machatý'sErotikon (1929) and Extase (1933), due to their unprecedented eroticism. The creation of the Barrandov Studios in 1931 by Václav Havel's ancestors made Prague one of the world's leading film centres, with a production that reached 80 films per year at the time, before the Nazis seized it for propaganda purposes. French filmmaker Julien Duvivier adapted a famous legend from Jewish and Prague folklore with The Golem in 1936. The end of the war gave rise to the real emergence of a Czechoslovakian cinema that was to become a milestone, notably with A Long Journey (Alfréd Radok, 1949), a work about the Shoah, full of symbolism and formal audacity.
The Czech New Wave: a brief renaissance
The 1960s were the scene of an incredible but brief efflorescence with the appearance of a miracle: the Czech New Wave, whose first petals bloomed shortly before the Prague Spring. Embodied by Miloš Forman, Jaromil Jireš, Věra Chytilová, and Jan Němec, to name only the best-known names, it shook up classicism and censorship by giving a great deal of room to improvisation, and by using non-professional actors in films that were willingly absurd or scathing in their humor. The directors, often from Prague, however, keep quite far away from their native city, preferring to anchor their stories in a rural Czechoslovakia, sometimes dreary but where at the same time a joyful irony can be seen. This is the case with Forman's Loves of a Blonde (1965), which sadly ends up in Prague. Věra Chytilová's unbridled fantasy seems best expressed in a bucolic setting or among the Little Daisies (1966) of her most famous film title. Jan Švankmajer, Jiří Trnka and Karel Zeman then show, in the field of animation, an imagination similarly disposed to extravagance. The Corpse Incinerator (Juraj Herz, 1969), a masterpiece halfway between horror and black humor, confirms that the country under Nazi rule remained Kafka's. The invasion of Prague by Soviet forces, documented by Jan Nemec's Oratorio for Prague in 1968 and later Le Fond de l'air est rouge (Chris Marker, 1977), put an end to what had been an enchanted interlude and forced many directors into exile: Miloš Forman, welcomed with open arms by Hollywood, would only return to Prague to film Amadeus (1985), a harbinger of the velvet revolution. In this famous biography - in English - of Mozart, what is still the Czechoslovak capital embodies Vienna on screen, and lends it such recognizable locations as St. Giles Church, the Wallenstein Palace, Hradčany Square or the State Theatre, where most of the operas were filmed. For his adaptation of Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), still persona non grata in his own country, Philip Kaufman had to recreate Prague in France, adding some archival footage by Jan Nemec.
Since the Velvet Revolution..
Kafka (1991), one of Steven Soderbergh's most personal films, which was a flop when it was released, fantasizes the biography of the famous Prague author in the mode of a spy thriller. Thanks to its studios, its composite architecture and relatively low production costs compared to other countries, Prague will once again become the promised land for foreign blockbusters, as if subjugated by its propensity to metamorphose, embodying in turn Victorian London(From Hell, Allen and Albert Hughes, 2001) or contemporary Zurich(Memory in the Skin, Doug Liman, 2002), and so on, in generally anecdotal entertainment. The city's National Museum is the setting for both the first part of Mission Impossible (Brian De Palma, 1996) and an episode of James Bond, Casino Royale (2006), perhaps indicating a certain redundancy - many scenes of the fourth Mission Impossible (Brad Bird, 2011) will also be filmed in Prague. Czech cinema, for its part, survived the transition as best it could without showing the miraculous vitality of the 1960s: Kolya (Jan Sverák, 1996) won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1997 and, like many films of the time, evokes the aftermath of communism. Old glories are still active, such as Jan Švankmajer, whose films, always placed under the sign of the dream, mix with an unparalleled originality animation and live action, fromAlice (1988) to Surviving Life (Theory and Practice), via The Faust Lesson (1994). I Who Served the King of England (2006), depicting Nazi-occupied Prague, shows that Jiří Menzel still has some nice leftovers. When will the next generation come along?
On the animated side, Czech director Michaela Pavlátová, after a seven-year hiatus, returned to film in 2021 with My Afghan Family, which tells the unusual story of a young Czech woman who decides to leave everything to follow her husband to Afghanistan and recounts her experience of daily life in a battered country. The film won numerous awards, notably at the Annecy Animation Film Festival.
