The State-Socialist Mode of Production and the Political History of Production Culture
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| Year of publication | 2013 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter aims to offer a model with which to compare the historical character of the various nationalized cinemas of East-Central Europe. The example of Barrandov Studios in the Czech capital of Prague provides my case study. The chapter pays particular attention to the manner in which day-to-day creative activities were managed within a system that designated the state the sole official producer, and to organizational solutions that were introduced in an effort to strike a balance between centralized control and creative freedom. I also focus on the ways in which such a mode of production operated within the historical realities of this production community, and on how its activities responded to institutional interests. I begin by sketching what I call the "state-socialist mode of film production"--which comprises management hierarchies, the division of labor, and work practices--through the example of Czechoslovak cinema from 1945 to 1990, and the systemic variations that it exhibited to other film industries in the region. There follows a description of "dramaturgy": a system of screenplay development and creative supervision that was typical of both the Czech and East German production systems, and which serves to highlight the revisionist dimensions of my model. A further three sections reveal some important aspects of the "production culture," which is to say a set of lived realities as they were experienced by workers throughout the professional hierarchy. The combination of these two approaches--one organizational in perspective (top-down), the other cultural (bottom-up)--enables us to read official production documents against the grain and to show that they offer limited accounts of what actually took place. Consequently, this chapter is able to shed new light on how production communities "internalized and acted upon" regulatory environments and institutional interests. |
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