Communist propaganda comes back to the screen at Kino Aero

The days of communist propaganda are back - at least at Prague’s Aero cinema, where ten films will be showcased over the coming days as part of a programme called Propaganda and Ideology in Czech Film. It’s not the laughably obvious kind of propaganda, though, that the city’s best-known art house cinema wants to look at, but the serious filmmaking that went into many of the films, and the mentality behind the censorship. The manager of Kino Aero, Ivo Andrle, told me about the idea for the mini-festival.

'Král Šumavy'

“We wanted to show films that were not meant to be propaganda, but after they were finished the regime decided they could be used that way. On the other hand there are films that were meant to be propaganda or that were not meant to be critical of the regime but after they were finished, the regime saw them as dangerous and censored them. So 20 years after 1989 we wanted to look back and try to understand how the regime actually made these decisions about the films, because sometimes from today’s perspective it is difficult to guess what was wrong with which film, why it was unpopular with the Communist Party. And it’s also sometimes difficult to say why they celebrated certain films, because we don’t see them as working in favour of the regime.”

Do some of the films have artistic value as well, or are they primarily tools of propaganda?

“Actually the point was to not show films that would be very bad, B or C categories of filmmaking. Of course when you say ‘propaganda’ there are many more films that people would know and remember that were just bad, bad movies, and sometimes you can see them being screened today at parties and festivals that are just trying to make fun of it. This wasn’t really our purpose; we wanted to show films that are more or less okay to watch and that do not just make you laugh.”

Your cinemas are kind of underground and attract an alternative audience of mostly younger people. Will they be particularly interested in this kind of cinema?

“Well we hope so. Primarily we were thinking of the younger generation when we were preparing this because for them the mystery is there. For them there is still the mystery of why this film was prohibited while another was used for propaganda, because they wouldn’t remember how it all worked. And of course the older generation that lived through it and was born before the films were made, there is not so much mystery for them because they lived it and remember how it worked. So, the youngest of the films is from 1987, so even that was some 23 years ago, so that’s already an adult, and that’s the age of the people we would like to see in the audience.”