The Czechoslovak New Wave: Freedom Before the Tanks

Two young women named Marie sit in a field and decide that because the world has gone bad, they will go bad too. What follows in Věra Chytilová's Daisies (Sedmikrásky, 1966) is seventy-odd minutes of gleeful sabotage: the pair swindle old men out of dinners, snip images into confetti with a pair of scissors, and finally storm an abandoned banquet hall to gorge themselves and grind an entire state feast into ruin under their heels. The colors detonate and dissolve; the editing refuses to behave. Czechoslovak authorities, missing the joke and grasping the insult, banned it for depicting food waste at a time of real shortages. That charge is almost too perfect. A cinema had arrived that could be censored only by admitting what it mocked.

Daisies was not an outlier but a flare sent up by an entire movement. Between roughly 1962 and 1968, filmmakers working inside a Soviet-bloc state produced one of the most inventive, funny, and formally daring bodies of work in postwar cinema — and they did it, astonishingly, on the state's own money.

A thaw, a film school, and a studio

The Czechoslovak New Wave grew from a specific loosening. After the death of Stalin in 1953 and the gradual de-Stalinization of the early 1960s, the ideological grip on the arts eased just enough for something new to breathe. The orthodoxy the young directors were rejecting was socialist realism — that airless doctrine of heroic workers, uplifting plots, and art as propaganda. Against it they set the ordinary, the awkward, the absurd.

Two institutions made the movement possible. The first was FAMU, the Prague film academy, which trained nearly the entire generation: Miloš Forman, Věra Chytilová, Jiří Menzel, Jan Němec, Ivan Passer, Evald Schorm, Jaromil Jireš. They emerged as classmates and collaborators, steeped in Italian neorealism and the French New Wave but pointed somewhere stranger. The second was the state-owned Barrandov Studios, which funded these films as a matter of cultural policy — a nationalized industry quietly bankrolling its own subversion, at least until officials caught up with what was on the screen.

The Slovak director Štefan Uher's The Sun in a Net (Slnko v sieti, 1962) is often named as the movement's ignition: a moody, elliptical portrait of disaffected youth that broke sharply with propaganda filmmaking, arriving a year before the first Czech New Wave features. It is worth remembering that this was a Czechoslovak wave, with a vital Slovak current running alongside the Prague-centered one.

The films that reached the world

Two of these pictures won Hollywood's highest foreign honor, a fact that still startles given their origins. Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos's The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965), a devastating tragicomedy about a meek carpenter appointed "Aryan controller" of an elderly Jewish widow's button shop during the war, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Two years later, Jiří Menzel's Closely Watched Trains (Ostře sledované vlaky, 1966) did the same — a tender, bawdy coming-of-age story about a young railway apprentice more preoccupied with his sexual failures than with the war around him, until the two collide. Adapted from a Bohumil Hrabal novel, it distilled the movement's signature tone: the enormous and the trivial held in the same deadpan frame.

Then there was Miloš Forman, whose Czech trilogy remains the movement's most accessible triumph. Black Peter (Černý Petr, 1964), Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky, 1965), and The Firemen's Ball (Hoří, má panenko, 1967) used non-actors, overheard-sounding dialogue, and an affectionate, unblinking eye for human vanity. The Firemen's Ball — in which a provincial fire brigade's raffle prizes are pilfered one by one and a beauty contest collapses into farce — was read by the authorities, correctly, as a parable of a system that could not organize a party without corruption and cowardice. After the 1968 invasion it was banned "forever."

Jan Němec pushed toward nightmare and allegory. His A Report on the Party and the Guests (O slavnosti a hostech, 1966) stages an outing that curdles into a study of coercion and conformity so pointed that it, too, was shelved. Ivan Passer's Intimate Lighting (Intimní osvětlení, 1965), by contrast, is all warmth and small gestures — two musician friends, a weekend, a meal — proof that the New Wave's radicalism lived as much in tenderness as in provocation.

What they invented

Strip away the individual styles and a shared toolkit emerges. These directors cast non-professional actors and let scenes breathe with improvisation, so that dialogue arrived crooked and true. They fused documentary observation — handheld black-and-white, real faces, real rooms — with sudden lurches into surrealism and absurdist comedy, refusing to keep realism and dream in separate boxes.

Crucially, they weaponized allegory to survive censorship. A firemen's raffle, a garden party, a button shop: the small tale carried the large indictment, and the ambiguity was itself the art. Literature fed this — Hrabal above all, whose sly, digressive prose gave the movement its comic-melancholy register. The 1966 omnibus Pearls of the Deep (Perličky na dně), adapting his stories in five segments by Menzel, Němec, Schorm, Chytilová, and Jireš, was received as something close to a collective manifesto. And in Chytilová's hands the toolkit turned fully experimental, treating the film strip itself as material to be cut, tinted, and shattered.

The tanks, and after

The Prague Spring of 1968 — Alexander Dubček's attempt at "socialism with a human face" — was the political expression of the same liberalizing energy that had freed the filmmakers. In August 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Prague and ended it. The "normalization" that followed did to the cinema what it did to the country. Films were pulled and, in some cases, condemned "for all time." Chytilová was barred from directing for years. Others left: Forman and Passer emigrated to the United States, where Forman would go on to make One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus, carrying the movement's humane, anti-authoritarian instincts into Hollywood and winning Best Director for both.

The wave itself lasted barely six years. Yet its influence outran its lifespan — in the deadpan absurdism that runs through later European art cinema, in the improvisatory realism reborn again and again, in the enduring lesson that comedy can be the most dangerous form of dissent. The Czechoslovak New Wave proved that the funniest films could also be the bravest, and that a joke, precisely aimed, was worth sending an army to silence.