The Normalized, the Normalizers and Their Cinemas

In both cinemas—that of the “normalizer” and that of the “normalized”—the political and economic stagnation reinforced by stochastic censorship and disillusioned society often leads to peculiar examples of mismatched ideology and aesthetics allowing for viewing them as accidental camp classics today. What structural changes do Czechoslovak studios undergo in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion? What thematic and aesthetic choices can be attributed to their moment in film history on both sides of the Iron Curtain? How does the soaring number of light entertainment genre like melodrama, comedy or musical correlate with the current events? Last but not least, the questions of actors’ agency in the face of state repression and censorship, of reevaluation of the immense corpus of films created during the late-Communist era feel relevant in Russian and Central European cinema and culture in general today.