Overrated and overlooked : the critical reception of Czechoslovak cinema in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s based on Karel Kachyňa’s Smugglers of Death

Szymański, Karol

doi:1230-5057

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Overrated and overlooked : the critical reception of Czechoslovak cinema in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s based on Karel Kachyňa’s Smugglers of Death Szymański, Karol

Object structure

Overrated and overlooked : the critical reception of Czechoslovak cinema in Poland in the 1950s and 1960s based on Karel Kachyňa’s Smugglers of Death

Studia z Dziejów Rosji i Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej, Vol. 55, No 3 (2020), Special Issue

Szymański, Karol

Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Instytut Historii im. Tadeusza Manteuffla Polskiej Akademii Nauk

Warszawa

2020

p. 75-102 ; Abstract in Polish and English.

Journal/Article

Král Šumavy (Motion picture : 1959) ; motion pictures - Czechoslovakia - history and criticism ; communism and motion pictures - Czechoslovakia ; Kachyňa, Karel (1924-2004) ; film criticism - Poland - history - 1945-1990 ; motion pictures - distribution - Poland - history - 1945-1990 ; critical reception of films in Poland ; Smugglers of Death (Král Šumavy) ; First Wave in Czechoslovak cinema ; Polish film criticism ; distribution of films in Poland ; genre cinema

Kachyňa’s "Smugglers of Death", first screened in Polish cinemas in 1960, was considered by critics as one of the top achievements of Czechoslovak film-making. Their focus, however, was on the entertainment and technical aspects of the work (treating it as a successful, ambitious genre film), glossing over its genesis, ideological content and political message. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, "Smugglers of Death", along with such pictures as "Romeo, Juliet and Darkness" by Jiří Weiss and "Invention for Destruction" by Karel Zeman, became one of the most highly rated and most extensively discussed Czechoslovak films in the Polish press. Yet in the meantime, Polish film critics (who gave surprisingly low ratings to "Hic Sunt Leones" by Václav Krška and "At the Terminus" by Ján Kadár and Elmar Klos) overlooked or downplayed the importance of the “thaw-era” pictures produced by the Czechoslovak First Wave, which burst the socialist realism straitjacket and experimented with new language and contemporary topics in the late 1950s.

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