The tram stopped several times along Olsanska, the long straight road that runs away from the Prague’s centre before the line curves north. The door to the building was heavy. Inside, the staircase was cool, its walls painted in thick green gloss below matt yellow.
The National Film Archive was established in 1943 to protect the nation’s film against the destructive capacity of war: Czechoslovakia was under German occupation. Within five years, the country would become a Communist state within the Eastern Bloc. The archive continues to collect, preserve and process audiovisual archival material, documenting national film production and Czech history. Briana Cechova, the archive’s Head of Film History, met me at the front, and later introduced me to Jiri Hornicek, Curator of Amateur Film.
During our conversation in his office, Jiri says only films with good topics could be screened under communism. By good he meant sanctioned.
“What were these good topics’?” I asked, “What couldn’t be filmed?”
“I think it would be better if I say the clubs existed as an activity of employees of factory workers,” he replied. During the 1970’s and 80’s cultural officers were appointed to document factory work and leisure activities. These officers led cine club activities and screenings, and produced propagandist films that presented state-sanctioned ideas. But, as Jiri explained, this was only one aspect of the Czech amateur film movement; “There were independent filmmakers who shot film without control,” he says, “but it was not possible to screen it publically; they organised screenings for only a few people. That was how the other line of amateur film existed in Czechoslovakia. Censorship controlled professional and non-professional film production and distribution until the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
Jiri leaned over his computer, looking for a catalogue number. “We have fantastic films from Pavel Barta,” he said, “really great films from the 1970s and 80s. I can show you.” He pulled a DVD from the bookshelf, Poslední Služba (The Last Service), which Barta made in 1983. The short film follows a man as he journeys through the streets of Prague, stopping occasionally to ask directions.
“This is Prague?” I asked. The Prague in Barta’s film did not resemble the one I had been walking around for four days, its buildings in disrepair, wrapped in scaffolding, the render behind cracked and broken.
“This is Prague in the 1980’s. It’s very different; the buildings are not so nice.” According to Jiri, Poslední Služba was based on a dream.
Poslední Služba preserves an image of the city as it was under communism, one that would have been censored had Barta, who also plays the film’s doomed protagonist, operated within a sanctioned cine club, or, indeed, within “professional” contexts. Prague, as a ruin, speaks of the anxiety and claustrophobia of life under the totalitarian regime: the protagonist, willingly seeking out and following directions, is journeying to his death.
The first half of the film is shot like a documentary; people stopped in the street do not seem to be actors, the scene viewed from a distance, the camera out of view. And Prague is not a construction, not a staged ruin. The point of view shifts suddenly; the middle section of the film is shot from first person: this is Barta’s eye. An unseen woman shouts and yells. The noise seems to be coming from inside the building, which looks deserted, like no one could live there. The protagonist walks between more dilapidated and deserted housing blocks, finally reaching a pile of papery rubbish, out of view from the street, where, having sought out his own death, he meets an official. Pseudo-folk music plays before silence. A bell tolls and he falls down, condemned because his name is not on a list.
Barta’s film is about sight, and keeping out of it. Scenes are shot with a hidden camera, a stand-in for the independent working under normalization, staged in areas between or behind buildings. Barta worked as a night watchman and shot 16mm films by day. These he screened in his apartment, out of sight, according to the logics of Samizdat, the production and distribution of sensitive material on a small scale, dissident activity that risked imprisonment. Barta oriented his camera at the city, looking surreptitiously, staging action as allegory, forced to describe a condition of being without straightforward telling. There was no list.
Film artifacts stage encounters with the recent past, but the story of ‘the other line’ in Czech amateur film remains partially obscured: the archive holds little of the film produced outside of the cine clubs. Much of it was shot on positive stock so there is only one copy, and the independents are still often reluctant to hand over. The archive can always borrow a film and transfer it onto a digital format, but the exchange is subject to mistrust, conditioned by memory of the recent past; “The filmmakers were independent people, they still don’t trust official government institutions.”
“Amateur filmmakers are reluctant to give you their films because of their politics?” I asked.
“It depends from person to person,” Jiri replied.
Barta was not unique, not the only independent operating outside state-sanctioned cine club, but his films stand out from the archive’s amateur film holdings. He deployed innovative camera and sound techniques, and appears to have mixed up documentary and fiction traditions.
“Were there a number of independents making such innovative and political film in the 70’s and 80’s?” I asked.
“Not so much,” Jiri replied, “This director is exceptional. I like experimental film, and this is a little bit like experimental film.” Jiri finds home movies, what he calls family films, a little bit boring. “Some collections are ten or twelve hours,” he said.
“Hours of sunsets…” I said.
“Weddings…”
“Gardens, beaches, holidays…”
“Barta’s film is… fresh.”
Amateur collapses into avant-garde; its technology is recast as subversive, a tool of defense. Refusal to operate within a club, screening films out of sight, acting independently, threatened the precise demarcations of labour upon which communist totalitarianism relied. Barta’s filmmaking was driven by a different kind of work, a kind of creative, “unproductive” labour, which resists ideology, and severs cultural production from the economic operations of the state. Refusal by amateur filmmakers to on pass their material to the institution, despite the breakdown of the communist regime, guarantees their status as “outsiders”, hidden, out of view. Inside the archive there will always be hours of sunsets.
Before I left Jiri showed me a film from an earlier age of amateur filmmaking in Czechoslovakia. Shot by a man who sold Pathe cameras and projectors to amateurs in the city, the short actuality recorded a rural celebration in the South Bohemia region.
“He specialized in this field of business,” said Jiri.
“So he’s an amateur filmmaker?” I asked.
“He was not a professional, he was a business manager. That was his profession,” Jiri explained, “He was on a trip to the countryside and he shot this film.”
Here was a clear distinction between work and leisure; this man was a businessman in the city and an amateur filmmaker in the countryside. When the camera of an independent amateur was orientated at the city under communist normalisation the line could not be drawn so easily.