Alice Lovejoy is McKnight Land-Grant Assistant Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and the Moving Image Studies program at the University of Minnesota.

Army Film and the Avant Garde

Cinema and Experiment in the Czechoslovak Military

Indiana University Press

Contents

A Deep and Fruitful Tradition: Jirí Jenícek, the Film Group, and Cinema Culture of the 1930s

"On the Goals and Responsibilities of Military Film," a 1937 article by Czechoslovak Army filmmaker Jirí Jenícek, 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." This quote serves as pretext for Jenícek'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.

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 Jenícek's estimation, is linked to military innovations in cinema's applications, of which he highlights three: propaganda, education, and technical.

If Jenícek'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 Jenícek 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, Jenícek'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 Jirí Lehovec. Others, like diplomat Jindrich Elbl, were government officials. By the time Jenícek 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. 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," Jenícek 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."

These founders — chief among them philosopher TomᚠGarrigue 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. 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. 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. Moreover, the republic's official "national" culture proved in practice to be primarily Czech, leaving little room for the expression of other identities.

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. 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 Jirí 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.

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." 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). 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

When, in 1925, the group was transferred once again — this time, to the General Staff's Training Division (Oddelení branné výchovy) and its Military Technical Institute (Vojenský technický ústav) — its production expanded to encompass, among others, nature and promotional films. 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 letcuv]), the 1929 spy film Mountain Calling SOS (Horské volání S.O.S.), and the 1928 For the Czechoslovak State (Za ceskoslovenský stát), which, with its Legionnaire topic and title, returned the Group to its earliest intentions and institutional roots.

In 1929, Jenícek — 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 Jenícek's understanding of military cinema. Jenícek'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 Bozena Nemcová's The Grandmother [Babicka], 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 Havlícek 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!

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 Jenícek'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 advent of film sound. The latter, in multinational Czechoslovakia, was an immediate lightning rod for nationalist rhetoric — as Nancy M. Wingfield has chronicled, the September 1930 screening of German-language sound films in Prague set off four nights of riots by Czech fascists. In this context, as Czechoslovakia began to feel the Depression's effects, concern grew about the economic and ideological ramifications of foreign (primarily American and German) film's predominance in the Czechoslovak market.

In April 1932, the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Business responded to this concern by implementing a "contingent" system, designed to retain money from foreign film exhibition and thereby bolster the domestic film industry. As Petr Szczepanik has detailed, like similar systems that had been established elsewhere in Europe since the 1920s, Czechoslovakia's contingent stipulated that in order to import a specified number of films, a foreign company was required produce one film in Czechoslovakia or to purchase a "contingent voucher." Yet Czechoslovakia's system was immediately less successful than its counterparts. Upon its implementation, the MPPDA (Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America) — which, Szczepanik writes, deemed Czechoslovakia too small to merit "such strict measures" — began a boycott of the Czechoslovak market that lasted for over two years. Making matters worse, the absence of American films from the market forced Czechoslovak cinema owners to rent German films — many of them either openly supportive of the Nazi Party or interpreted as such — in order to stay in business.

With this, film import and export became pressing matters of national security and cultural identity. Indeed, it was not only economics (the fate of the domestic film industry) or the prospect of war (signaled by Nazi propaganda) that worried Czechoslovaks but also domestic politics. At the heart of these stood the country's northern and western, largely German-speaking, borderlands. Home to a substantial proportion of Czechoslovakia's industry, the region was hit particularly hard by the Depression, and in 1933, its economic concerns were channeled into politics by Konrad Henlein's newly founded Sudeten German Homeland Front. The latter, which transformed itself into a political party (the Sudeten German Party [Sudetendeutsche Partei or SdP]) in 1935, in Eagle Glassheim's words, blamed the region's economic problems on "perceived Czech discrimination, as well as Jews and global capitalism." The SdP's appeals to solidarity with the Nazi Party and articulation of a distinct German national identity threatened the Czechoslovak government's carefully managed multinationalism. And thus, as journalists and film professionals watched increasing numbers of films from Germany appearing on Czechoslovak screens, they began to call urgently for a two-pronged remedy: for Czechoslovakia to appease the American studios, and for the country to begin producing its own cultural propaganda films as a counterweight to the German films.

One such call came at the end of October 1933, in a letter sent by František Papoušek — a prominent Prague lawyer and co-owner of the Fenix cinema — to Jindrich Elbl, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs' young Film Officer. Papoušek's letter described the situation that Czechoslovak cinema owners faced — "If we do not have American films," he explained, "we must rent and play German films" — framing it in terms of nationality, defense, and the intertwined issues of sound and language. Papoušek argued that film has greater "cultural importance and effect on the wider public" than media such as radio and literature, and used the Third Reich as an illustration, contending that "one simply has to look at Germany, and at how film, there, has become one of the primary means for psychological mobilization." "We, too," he wrote,

are currently in a state of psychological mobilization. ... At the very least, we should not help the enemy mobilize. For it is clear that every film that arrives from Germany, even if its subject is innocent, has an effect in Czechoslovakia in terms of language; in that it is in the German language with its German soul.