Pavel SKOPAL (Mazaryk University, Brno, Tchéquie)

Going to the Cinema as a Czech:

Preferences and Practices of Czech Cinemagoers in the Occupied City of Brno, 1939–1945

After the occupation of the Czech lands by Nazi Germany in March 1939, Czechs embraced domestic (and ignored German) movies more vigorously than they had before. This implies that the occupation caused notable changes in the mode of movie reception. After about 1942, however, the popularity of a portion of German production was increasing. This fact raises the question of whether cinemagoers' values and identities were undergoing significant change under the occupation. This paper focuses on Brno, a city with a long history of coexistence and rivalry between those who identified as Germans and as Czechs. I argue that watching a Czech movie became one of the behaviors that defined the Czech national identity. The later embrace of German entertainment by Czechs was accompanied by two strategies that redeemed watching the desired cinematic distraction from being an un-Czech behavior: by indexing the movies as not fully German due to the presence of non-German stars, and by a parallel redefinition of cinemagoers' Czech behavior from choosing Czech movies to choosing cinemas identified as non-German. These strategies represent culturally specific reactions by Czech audiences living in a nationally divided city to the distribution and exhibition practices applied during the occupation.

La séance aura lieu le mardi 19 novembre 2019 à partir de 17h00 salle A 108 (île du Saulcy Metz Bâtiment A : UFR Arts Lettres et Langues). Elle correspond à un travail universitaire publié cette année au sein de la revue Film History : Pavel Skopal, Film History, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 27-55.