Mass and Community in the Rhythm of Steps: A Counter-Analysis of Soviet and Czechoslovak Societies in Ivan Balaďa’s Films “Metrum” and “The Forest”
Karol Szymański
karol_szymanski@wp.plUniversity of Gdańsk (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9158-9452
Abstract
At the end of the 1960s, Ivan Balaďa made two short documentaries: Metrum (1967) and The Forest (Les, 1969). In the former, he observed crowds of travellers walking through the spaces of the Moscow metro, and in the latter – the attendees of the funeral of Jan Palach, who in January 1969 committed an act of self-immolation as a protest against the aggression of the Warsaw Pact troops. The author treats Balaďa’s creative films as a medium for Marc Ferro’s counter-analysis of social structures and power relations in the USSR and Czechoslovakia. He argues that thanks to the inquiring observation of, i.a., the rhythm, meter, and pace of the movement of two mass gatherings, the director managed to visually capture their underlying nature and the mechanisms that define them. Based on a detailed analysis of the films, which involves musicological concepts, the author recognizes the Soviet society as a homogeneous and involuntary mass and the Czechoslovak one as an autonomous and sovereign civic community.
Keywords:
Ivan Balaďa, documentary film, visual social counter-analysis, social structures, rhythm and pace of crowdsReferences
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Authors
Karol Szymańskikarol_szymanski@wp.pl
University of Gdańsk Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9158-9452
Master of History, PhD in Art Sciences, film historian and film scholar. Assistant Professor at the Cultural Research Institute at the University of Gdańsk. Member of the Polish Society for Film and Media Studies. He wrote the book Krawiec, książę i chłopaki z brązu. Fantazmat homoseksualny w powojennym kinie czechosłowackim [Tailor, Prince and Boys of Bronze: A Homosexual Phantasm in the Post-war Czechoslovak Cinema] (2020). He is also an author and producer of the pioneering online database of films distributed in Polish cinemas in the years 1944-1989: www.naekranachprl.pl. Admirer of the art of song by Marta Kubišová, Anna Prucnal and Marianne Faithfull.
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