Czech animator Jan Svankmajer is one of the most distinctive and influential of contemporary filmmakers. As a leading member of the Prague Surrealist Group, his work is linked to a rich avant-garde tradition and an uncompromising moral stance that brought frequent tensions with the authorities in the "normalization" years following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Svankmajer's formative influences have been the pre-war surrealists, the Prague of Rudolf II, experimental theatre, folk puppetry and, above all, the political traumas of the past 50 years. Like his...

This new volume in the Twenty-Four Frames series focuses on twenty-four key Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish films from the twenties to the present. Between the wars the cinemas of Hungary, Poland, and the former Czechoslovakia each claimed their pioneers of early cinema and attained significant levels of production. They first attracted international attention in the 1930s, confirming this status with a succession of politically and aesthetically challenging films from the 1950s to the present. The work of directors such as Andrzej Wajda, Miklos Jancso, Jiri Menzel, Istvan Szabo,...

This book is the first study in English to examine some of the key themes and traditions of Czech and Slovak cinema, linking inter-war and post-war cinemas together with developments in the post-Communist period. It examines links between theme, genre, and visual style, and looks at the ways in which a range of styles and traditions has extended across different historical periods and political regimes. Czech and Slovak Cinema provides a unique study of areas of Central European film history that have not previously been examined in English.

The Czechoslovak New Wave was originally published in 1985 and was quickly established as the world's leading authoritative English-language text. A study of the most significant movement in post-war Central and East European cinemas, it examines the origins of a movement against the political and cultural developments of the 1960s leading to the Prague Spring of 1968. Peter Hames also summarizes key aspects of Czech and Slovak histories between the wars and in the 1940s and 1950s. Directors discussed include Milos Forman, Jan Svankmajer, Jiri Menzel, Jan Nemec.