There are many so-called "new waves" in film history, from the French nouvelle vague (1959 through the middle 1960s), the Australian new wave (mid-to-late 1970s), the new wave of Taiwanese cinema (beginning in the 1980s), and the current "new wave" blossoming in Danish filmmaking, to mention a few. While such monikers serve many purposes, including facilitating international marketing , they do identify those regions where, for any number of reasons, particularly fertile and original bodies of creative work have emerged.

Begining around 1963 and continuing through the "Prague Spring" of 1968, one of the most vibrant and unusual of these "waves" rolled through Czechoslovakia. Stalin’s death in 1953 and the emerging thaw in east central European politics had led to a steady decline in Socialist Realist filmmaking and the gradual emergence in the 1960s of new and unconventional artistic voices in Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia. Characterized to some degree by a subtle mixing of fiction and documentary, the Czech "school" enjoyed perhaps the most unprecedented degree of freedom, up until the arrival of the Soviet tanks in August 1968.

Our series revisiting the Czech New Wave runs throughout our September/October calendar and includes among its highlights a newly restored print of Ivan Passer’s Intimate Lighting, classic works by Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, and Jan Kadar, and what we believe may be the first ever Boston screening of the legendary epic masterpiece Marketa Lazarova.

"The seeming mystery of this veritable miracle within the confines of a totalitarian state is easily explainable. The more cultured comrades who became responsible for the film industry in the sixties simply ‘forgot’ that Lenin saw film solely as a propaganda tool, and made the ‘mistake’ of viewing it as an art form. Retaining the organizational structure of the industry which had been designed for the production of propaganda, they used its bottomless financial resources to fund artistic probes into the situation of man on this earth. State ownership of the industry can, indeed, be ideal, as Milos Forman once said, provided that the state, or at least its film agency, is run by philosophers." – Josef Skvorecky