| Description |
To start comparative research of East-Central European film industries and their relations to the local and global models, we need, among others, to define the state-socialist mode of production, its systemic variations and socio-cultural expressions. But there is no methodology specifically developed to do so. Thus, we can draw on Janet Staiger’s work on Classical Hollywood Cinema, still the most fundamental model to analyze film production (Staiger describes changing production practices via analysis of division of labor and levels of management.), and try to ask the same set of questions and identify significant differences. In the socialist countries, strategic management (in Hollywood: studio heads and owners) was monopolized by the state (ministries, and indirectly by the Communist Parties) and their representatives in the state-owned studios: general managers and committees. The state was setting a general strategy by defining a legal status, economic and organizational structure and general production directives for the studios. The state itself was the ultimate producer of all films, keeping control over capital, production means, labor force, and long-term planning. The key distinction between the state-socialist mode and Hollywood on the level of tactical management is that the first one lacks detailed division of labor: conception is not clearly separated from execution, i.e. script is not separated from production and postproduction. However, this was not specific for East-Central Europe. Kristin Thomson showed how directors were in control of script development as well as of postproduction in Germany or France in the 1920s and 1930s (often writing their shooting scripts and editing their footage) and that the “central producer system”, typical for the first stage of the “Classical Hollywood Cinema” mode (1914-1931), didn’t arrive to Europe until mid 1930s. In the East-Central Europe, it fully developed only during the Nazi occupation and further under the Communist regimes. East-Central European cinemas after WWII were not only inheritors of the inter-war European industrial models: when we look at them from the organizational point of view, they reveal similarities with Hollywood, too. So-called state-socialist mode of film production was in fact a peculiar hybrid of local, regional and global models: it was prepared by the Nazi cultural politics (the idea of centralized “dramaturgy” which enabled ideological control) and Aryanization (which made the post-war nationalization easier). After 1945 and later, after 1948 (when Communists took power in Czechoslovakia), it further developed according to local (Bata shoe factory, inspired by American scientific management) and global (Soviet system, silently inspired by Hollywood vertically integrated studios) models. These three levels of organizational tradition - both in terms of production mode and work culture - persisted as mutually interacting ingredients of the state monopoly until the late 1980s and even on. The aim of the paper is to articulate a comparative model for historical analysis of nationalized cinemas in the region, using the Barrandov studios in Prague as an example. The key question it asks is: how was creativity and day-to-day production of films tactically managed in a system where the only real producer was the state? What organizational instruments had to be developed to balance the centralized control with necessary creative freedom?
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