CZECH FILM AFTER 1989: THE WAVE OF THE YOUNG NEWCOMERS THE history of Czech cinema has been frequently marked and stigmatized, more than the non- industrial and more individual art disciplines, by large historical social upheavals which the Czech lands experienced in this century. During its hundred-year-long history, the Czech film survived five different social systems. Its origins (the first films on the Czech soil were presented by Jan Kříženecký in 1898) are rooted in the era of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After the First World War, it continued its development in a free and democratic Czechoslovak Republic which was after two decades destroyed by the Nazi Germany. A fundamental systemic change occurred in 1945 when the Czechoslovak film was nationalized i.e., that the state (and after 1948 the Communist establishment) completely controlled all film activities in the entire country.(1) After the demise of the Communist dictatorship in...
