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- Title
If not for their Artistic Merit then their Capacity to Connect with People.
- Authors
Bláhová, Jindřiška; Nowell, Richard
- Abstract
This essay examines the Czechoslovak State Film Company's (CSF) handling of youth-oriented American imports including REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER (1977), and DIRTY DANCING (1987) in the late Cold War period. From an analysis of cultural policy statements, press coverage, and promotional materials, the essay argues that this organization's Central Film Distributor (CFD) framed such films in four historically situated ways reflecting changes in Czechoslovak Communist Party cultural policy: blaming parents for student unrest, demonizing American capitalist democracy, undermining subversive indigenous subcultures, and suggesting the liberalization of the cultural sphere. The authors posit that these approaches were rooted in important social and political developments of the late 1960 and were informed by conditions characterizing the period in which they were widely adopted. To date, historians have emphasized the concerns European claims-makers expressed about youth-oriented American fare in the second half of the twentieth century. By contrast, the case of the CSF and the CFD not only develops understandings of this organization, but also reveals that some European elites drew fairly positive conclusions about this type of film.
- Subjects
REBEL Without a Cause (Film); SATURDAY Night Fever (Film); CULTURAL policy; KOMUNISTICKA strana Ceskoslovenska (Political party : Czechoslovakia); MOTION picture distributors; AMERICAN films
- Publication
Iluminace, 2015, Vol 27, Issue 1, p43
- ISSN
0862-397X
- Publication type
Essay