a 2012

I think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, Comrade! International Romances in Czechoslovak Co-productions (Those Born in 1921 /1957/, May Stars /1959/ and Interrupted Song /1960/)

SKOPAL, Pavel

Basic information

Original name

I think This is the Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship, Comrade! International Romances in Czechoslovak Co-productions (Those Born in 1921 /1957/, May Stars /1959/ and Interrupted Song /1960/)

Authors

SKOPAL, Pavel (203 Czech Republic, guarantor, belonging to the institution)

Edition

Workshop Der Lange Weg nach Hause. Ein filmhistorisches Symposium über das Heimkehren aus dem Krieg, 2012

Other information

Language

English

Type of outcome

Konferenční abstrakt

Field of Study

Literature, mass media, audio-visual activities

Country of publisher

Germany

Confidentiality degree

není předmětem státního či obchodního tajemství

RIV identification code

RIV/00216224:14210/12:00058572

Organization unit

Faculty of Arts

Keywords in English

socialist cinema; co-productions; romance films; prisoners of war

Tags

Změněno: 30/10/2015 20:12, doc. Mgr. Pavel Skopal, Ph.D.

Abstract

V originále

For international co-productions in general, and for the Czechoslovak co-productions during the 1950s in particular, border-crossing romances represent essential nourishment for the narrative engine. I have chosen the three headlined Czechoslovak co-productions – which had been the only three co-productions situated to the period of World War II and produced in Czechoslovakia till 1960 – to point out how much were the love plots determined by the ideological lines separating the actual or potential lovers. In Those Born in 1921, a Czech young man drawn to Germany for forced labour falls in love with a German nurse. He denies participate in his friends escape to home and elects to stay with his love instead. She is arrested, however, and the Czech guy is left with a German communist, a member of resistance movement. May Stars signals a romance between a Czech girl and a young Russian officer who just liberated her village – a possibility of romance is suggested just to be erased afterwards together with the officers home address. Just the love between a Slovak soldier, serving first in the German army and then in the Czechoslovak Army Corps, and a Georgian nurse is guided to the happy end: the Slovak, first imprisoned by the Soviet army, proves his loyalty and bravery and substitutes his Georgian friend – and the nurses brother – who was killed on the Western front. I want to argue that the stories of love between members of two nations was influenced by the concepts which were inevitably dragged into the field of potential interpretations: collaboration, betrayal, gratitude, and, above all, the dynamic of the relation between two nations as occupied, liberated, doomed, redeemed, colonised, (un)equal.

Links

GAP409/11/0586, research and development project
Name: Komparativní výzkum filmové kultury ve východním bloku, 1945-1970
Investor: Czech Science Foundation, Cinema Culture in the Eastern Bloc, 1945-1970 - A Comparative Study