Archival Spaces

392: Czech Silent Cinema

Archival Spaces 392

Czech Silent Film History

Uploaded 6 February 2026

Back in Summer 2023 (Blog 326), I wrote about a Czech film playing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, The Organist at St. Vitus Cathedral (1929), directed by Jan S. Kolár. It is an amazingly atmospheric melodrama, shot mostly in real locations around Prague’s Hradčany Castle, its magnificent Cathedral, and Alchemist’s Alley, as well as other Mala strana locations, the medieval quarter on the left bank of the Vltava River. I’ve now been asked by Dennis Bartok of Crocodile Films to write an essay for a new Blu-ray release of two other Jan Kolár films, including The Arrival From the Darkness (1921) and St. Wenceslaus (1930), as well as a number of shorts. Kolar is not as well-known as other Czech directors, such as Gustav Machatý (Ecstasy, 1932) and Karel Lamač (Saxophone Suzi, 1928), possibly because his directorial career ended with the advent of sound. However, Czech silent cinema in general has been ignored by film historians.

One searches in vain in classic film histories for assessments of Czech cinema of the 1920s, even though Prague’s annual film production had been steadily increasing since 1918-19, reaching admirable figures for such a small country. Neither Georges Sadoul nor Gregor/Patalas discusses Prague cinema. If Czech film is mentioned at all, e.g., by René Jeanne and Charles Ford, it is only in connection with Gustav Machatý, whose two art films, Kreutzer Sonata (1926) and Erotikon (1929), were screened internationally. Paul Rotha wrote that films made in Czechoslovakia were unknown, apart from Machatý’s Ecstasy. Only Jerzy Toeplitz mentions other trends, such as the sentimental comedies of Lamač or the nationalistically tinged biographical films of Svatopuk Innemann, while quoting Czech film historians Karel Smrž, Myrtil Frída, and Jaroslav Brož, all of whom favored the so-called “cosmopolitan direction” of Machatý. The Czech émigré historians Mira and Antonin Liehm confirm the dismissive opinion of some Czech film historians regarding the entire silent film production when they write that, despite the considerable number of Czech film productions, “…the films grew to display increasing provincialism, oriented more and more solely to the domestic viewer’s desire for cheap entertainment and even cheaper nationalism.” Meanwhile, Czech film specialist Peter Hames dedicates only a few lines to Machatý, but at least acknowledges that 1920s film production still needs to be researched.

*Daughters of Eve* (1928, Karel Lamač), with Anny Ondra

*Erotikon (*1929, Gustav Machatý) with Ita Rina

Part of the problem is that international film historiography only promoted art films, while the emergence of a national culture in commercial cinema was ignored. Yet, with an annual production of approximately 26 to 38 feature films a year, the Czech silent film industry’s output was only slightly exceeded by the Czechoslovak “New Wave” of the 1960s.

It is also important to consider that surviving Czech films present the opportunity to study an entire national film production, which is hardly possible for any other film-producing country. An informal survey shows that 163 feature films from the years 1920 to 1930 still survive, while 101 are lost. Thus, the Czechs have managed to preserve more than 60% of their national production, while approximately 90% of German and American film production from the silent film era has disappeared. This survival rate allows for an analysis of Prague’s film production in a breadth and depth that is unmatched. Today, after Czech cinema achieved worldwide acclaim in the 1960s, after three Czech films won Oscars, and after the domestic film industry has now again been operating under capitalism for 37 years, 20 to 22 feature films are produced annually, accounting for approximately 23% of the films shown in the Czech Republic. Perhaps, therefore, a new historical approach is needed to account for the specific historical circumstances of Prague film production in the 1920s.

*Colonel Svec* (1930, Svatopuk Innemann)

Born in 1918 out of the embers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first Czechoslovak Republic featured an American-style democratic constitution, a highly industrialized economy, and a strong middle class. In the 1920s, Czech film producers financed a significant number of films, which were directed solely at the domestic market, being produced cheaply enough to forgo foreign sales in their amortization plans. The Czech model of cultural autarchy thus complicates the widely held notion that all national film production needs an export market. A recurring criticism of those Czech films with foreign releases concerned the numerous intertitles, which were characterized as anachronistic. One reviewer, e.g., complained about the “overabundant, conflict-creating, and conflict-resolving titles” in Kreutzer Sonata. However, it must be remembered that before 1918 and the founding of the Republic, all films screened in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to have German titles or dual-language titles. It can therefore be argued that the overabundance of Czech intertitles played an important role in creating a sense of national, cultural identity and provided pleasure for Czech speakers, previously denied expressions of their own language.

I would therefore like to propose some working hypotheses to stimulate research into Czech silent film, focusing on the national rather than the international, on genre production rather than art films. 1. Czech film producers of the 1920s financed films that recouped their costs in the domestic market, without necessarily focusing on the international market. 2. Commercial genres, such as comedies and melodramas, but also, on a more sophisticated level, film adaptations of Czech literary works and historical films, dominated Prague’s film production. 3. Both comedies, melodramas, and historical films conveyed specifically Czech values that contributed to identity formation. 4. National themes and popular ideas were prioritized to enhance popularity domestically. 5. The survival of a large portion of Czech film production allows for a broad-based content analysis of Czech films, specifically to suss out cultural obsessions.

Hopefully, the Blu-ray release of the Kolar films will stimulate interest in further Czech silents, e.g., the films of Thea Červenková (The Grandmother, 1921), Premysl Prazský (Batalion, 1927), Karel Lamač (Sins of a Woman, 1929), Svatopuk Innemann (Colonel Svec, 1930), and Karel Anton (Tonka of the Gallows, 1930), even if these names are unpronounceable for English speakers.

**Tonka of the Gallows** **(1930, Karel Anton)**

391: People On Sunday

Archival Spaces 391

Monograph: People On Sunday

Uploaded 23 January 2026

**Erwin Splettstößler, Christl Ehlers, Brigitte Borchert, Wolfgang von Wltershausen**

For years, I have been teaching a German film history course. One of the films I have consistently screened is Robert Siodmak’s Menschen am Sonntag/People on Sunday (1929), not only because it is my favorite film of the late Weimar Republic, but also because it is a film that undergraduate students immediately connect with. The story of four youngsters in their twenties, spending a leisurely Sunday on Lake Wannsee, while another sleeps the day away, offers students an immediate point of identification, as does the film’s striking modernity, both in terms of content and style. Students are shocked that the generation of their great-grandparents “hooked up” for casual pre-marital sex, a scene presented without the moral condemnation that would have characterized similar scenes in Hollywood films, even thirty years later. Shot in real locations, rather than on studio sets, its improvised script, its documentary realism, its roving camera, its haphazard editing, mark People on Sunday as a precursor to both the French New Wave and low-budget American independent cinema of the past thirty years. Charlotte Ritter, a Berlin girl, like the three female protagonists, watches the film in the hit TV series, Berlin Babylon(2017-22).

Beach photographer at Wannsee in *Menschen am Sonntag*

Of course, calling it a Robert Siodmak film is a bit of a misnomer. The film was shot on weekends over months by a collective of young Jewish filmmakers trying to break into the industry, including Moriz Seeler (producer), Robert (director)and Kurt Siodmak (extra), Edgar G. Ulmer (director, uncredited), Billy Wilder (ghostwriter), Rochus Gliese (director, uncredited), Fred Zinnemann (camera assistant), and Eugen Schüfftan (camera), only Schüfftan and Gliese veterans. Almost all of the principals were forced to emigrate after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, their subsequent major Hollywood careers contributing to the film’s legendary status. The exceptions: Moriz Seeler goes into hiding in Berlin, is arrested and shipped to Riga, where he is murdered by Nazi troops in August 1942; Gliese, the art director, survived the war, protected by Gustav Gründgens, during the Third Reich, both gay men in extreme danger. Heike Klapdor reveals the last two fates in her German-language monograph, Robert Siodmoak, Edgar G. Ulmer: Menschen am Sonntag (Munich, 2025).

In less than100-pages, Klapdor discusses the convoluted production history of People on Sunday, contextualizes the film within German film production in a moment of the world economic crisis, and then subsequently critically reads the film in nine short chapters. Her guiding metaphor for the film is Kairos, a propitious moment for action, “when historical time is in a state of crisis and chronological time deviates from its linear and predictable course… allowing for liberation, if a subjective capacity for action perceives the objective crisis” (p. 18). Kairos applies to both the film team and to the film’s characters.

**Brigitte Borchart in Electrola Store**

Central to her analysis are the twenty-something protagonists, typical lower-middle-class, white-collar employees, the kind Siegrfried Kracauer analyzed in his The Salaried Masses (1930). She goes on to discuss the urban environment of Berlin, the film’s aesthetic strategy between documentary reality and fiction, the leisure time activities of Berliners, whether in the cinema or out in fresh air, eroticism and sexual relations, montages of photographic portraits, and its status as avant-garde film. Menschen am Sonntag is less a city film, e.g. Berlin, die Sinfonie einer Großstadt (1927), than “the face of urban lifestyle.”These young women have no qualms about getting picked up when a man strikes their fancy, while young men chase after sex, but are just as happy going to a football match. The five protagonists are amateurs, not actors, young people playing themselves in their hometown environments.

**Brigitte Borchert**, **Wolf** **v. Walershausen**

Klapdor interprets the famous scene of seduction in the woods, during which the camera coyly pans up to the tree tops and then down to a pile of garbage, as a complex amalgamation of female resistance and desire, male pursuit and conquest, heaven and hell, love and death. The couple’s hook-up references a similar scene in Alfred Döblin’s best-selling Weimar novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, that ends in the murder of the girl, and Mozart’s opera, Don Giovanni. Sonntag’s seducer, an itinerant wine salesman called Wolf. Klapdor’s conclusion: This film, so full of youthful exuberance, so playful in its narrative and aesthetic means, evidences a moment of real optimism, before Berlin and the nation plunged into the abyss of German Fascism: “Menschen am Sonntag is not a gloomy film, but rather a bright, preceptive film.”

Nowhere in the film is that playfulness more evident than in the interpolated photographic portraits of Berliners, taken by a beach photographer, at leisure, in motion, enjoying life; Siodmak interpolates photos of colleagues in the film business, including Valeska Gert(Joyless Street), Hans Heinrich von Twardowski (Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), Edith Meinhard (Diary of a Lost Girl), Margo Lion (Three Penny Opera) und Moriz Seeler. Is it an inside joke, or are these celebrities ultimately only ordinary Berliners? In a similar vein of self-deprecation, an early scene shows the chauffeur and his live-in girlfriend tear up star photos of each other’s favorite movie idols. Like the film, Klapdor’s little book allows us to enjoy the paradoxes, without demanding final answers.

Brigitte Borchert, **Erwin Splettstößler**

390: United States Information Agency

Archival Spaces 390

My Short Government Career

Uploaded 9 January 2025

**Entrance, “Filmmaking in America,” Opening 3 April 1988**

In the Fall of 1987, I received a call from David Paul, a producer at the United States Information Agency, asking if I could compile for them a list of German Academy Award winners. No problem. He followed up with a letter a month later, inviting me to work in East Berlin on a USIA exhibit. Founded in 1953 at the height of the Cold War, USIA was the propaganda arm of the American government. The Agency’s mission, in its own words, was “to understand, inform and influence foreign publics in promotion of the national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions, and their counterparts abroad.” Little did I know that my short career at USIA would see the last gasp of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Given the agency’s anti-Communist legacy, I was not keen on working for USIA, but Mr. Paul noted that German Democratic Republic film officials acknowledged “the expertise of Dr. Horak and are in complete agreement” to invite him to East Berlin as a film specialist for a USIA exhibit, “Filmmaking in America.” I felt I couldn’t turn down the Germans, given my long-standing relationship with the film archives of the GDR. I never found out who supported me in East Berlin, but I suspect it was Wolfgang Klaue, the head of the Staatliches Filmarchiv der DDR, to whom I spoke regularly at FIAF conferences. David Paul wanted me to train docents for the exhibit. Furthermore, I was to act as a master of ceremonies for the opening, give lectures, and meet with local film industry people, including a visit to the East Berlin film archives..

**Radio Tower, Alexander Place, former East Berlin**

**Ambassador Meehan (right)**, **David Paul, JC Horak** **(top center), Erwin Geschoneck (just below left)**

After receiving a U.S. government security clearance, I arrived in East Berlin on 31 March, billeted at the Hotel Metropol, a premier “Interhotel” for Western foreigners. The exhibit itself was housed on the ground floor of the East Berlin radio tower on Alexander Square. It was a massive 8,000-square-foot exhibit, consisting of prefabricated panels for easy transportation, with reproductions of photographs, film clips on monitors, and audio recordings that related the history of Hollywood. My contribution specific to the German iteration was the “Hall of Fame,” consisting of photos of prominent Hollywood film people born in Germany. The docents were all American students studying in Berlin who spoke German. After a couple of days of training, we were ready for the gala opening, which was attended by several very high functionaries of the ruling Socialist Unity Party, American Ambassador Francis J. Meehan, and the “state actor” Erwin Geschonneck (Jacob the Liar). But the real surprise was the next morning at the public opening, when literally thousands of East Berliners stood in line around the radio tower, waiting to see this first American exhibit ever in East Germany. The first seven days of the exhibit saw an incredible 30,000 visitors, and eventually brought in 126,000 visitors in 22 days, making it the USIA’s most successful site for that exhibit. And while it was reviewed in Neues Deutschland, the official organ of the Socialist Unity Party, the success was due to word-of-mouth, since it had not been supported in State media, which usually ignored or suppressed news from the West.

**Invitation to Ambassador’s film premiere**

**Boy at the Berlin Wall. 1961/62. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)**

Living in East Berlin, without ever going to West Berlin (except for one late night of bar hopping with my docents) was a strange experience. I had spent time in West Berlin for research or at the Berlinale Film Festival, but usually only visited East Berlin briefly to buy books or go to the film library, and never stayed overnight. As an American, I was able to procure a 24-hour visa easily at “Checkpoint Charlie.” On this trip, I had plenty of time to explore other parts of East Berlin, even travelling to the outskirts at Lake Müggel, where I interviewed Rudolf Hirsch, an anti-Nazi writer who, after spending years underground in Nazi Germany and the war years in Palestine, moved to East Berlin in 1949. I gave two lectures at the GDR film school “Konrad Wolf” in Potsdam and the Humboldt University in East Berlin, my topic: German Jewish film émigrés in Hollywood. On the drive to Potsdam, which required an hour-long detour around West Berlin, often driving along ‘the Wall,’ Mr Klaue told me “citizens of the GDR no longer see the Wall,” which surprised me, given how far we had to drive to get around it. The Wall would, in fact, come down 18 months later and along with it the Communist government.

**Meeting with Krátký Film**, **Right**: **M. Schirn, Rachel Reichman, Tanya Weinberger**

Then, in January 1989, I received a call from David Paul, asking me whether I would organise a seminar in Prague, in connection with the Czech version of “Filmmaking in America.” While the docent training was handled by a colleague, the Czechs stated that the “history and beginnings of the U.S. film industry were quite well-known and therefore suggested an emphasis on contemporary developments,” including a seminar on animation and new independent cinema. My mission was to organise the seminar and visit Czech institutions related to film production. I invited three filmmakers and one critic: Leslie Lee, African-American scriptwriter; Rachel Reichman, independent woman filmmaker; Tanya Weinberger, independent animator; and Don Crafton, film academic and author of an important history of animation. We arrived on Sunday in May, Monday, we had all-day briefings with the American Embassy and our host, Krátký Film. The next day, we staged our seminar, Rachel and Leslie making presentations about their work in American independent cinema, followed by a discussion, where I asked most of the questions, while the audience politely listened. I learned privately that not only had the State-owned Krátký Film done almost no advanced publicity, inviting only selected individuals, but that they were extremely nervous about the topics which might come up. The exhibit itself had been hidden away in an exhibition hall in Letna Park, north of the Moldau.

**Don Crafton, Leslie Lee, Rachel Reichman, Tanya Weinberger on Charles Bridge, Prague**

**Filmová a televizní fakulta Akademie múzických umění** **(FAMU), Film School, Pague**

The second day, dedicated to animation, proceeded much more smoothly, animation being less politically charged. Tanya discussed her computer-generated animated films, which the Czech audience of animators ogled in awe, as if suddenly having a window into the future, given that computer culture in Prague was still in the dark ages. Don’s lecture on the history of American animation, with numerous examples, was received with a different kind of interest because the Czechs had probably never seen them. Over the next few days, we met with a host of other Czech film industry types, having candid discussions and less productive propaganda sessions, sometimes even perceiving schisms in the Czech ranks, with younger hosts openly sympathetic. The Apparatchiks had reason to worry; in less than six months, the Stalinist government would fall.

**Entrance, Filmmaking in America, Katowice, Poland**

A little more than a year later, my wife and I were in Madrid on vacation when David Paul tracked me down again. His “Filmmaking in America” docent trainer had to cancel days before the Polish iteration opened in Katowice. After getting permission from the George Eastman Museum, I flew to Kraków in June 1990, where a day later, I began training local Polish students. The opening and subsequent interviews with the press went well. The Communists had relinquished power only months earlier, so Poland was a bit like the Wild West, a country in political limbo. Prostitutes formed a gauntlet in my hotel lobby, drugs were easily obtainable. I did have a chauffeur and a car at my disposal. I asked him to drive me to Auschwitz, but that is another story. With the Fall of Communism in Eastern Europe, the USIA’s days were also numbered.

**Jan-Christopher Horak in Katowice at entrance to exhibt**

389: Saul Bass & Oscar

Archival Spaces 389:

Saul Bass wins an Academy Award

Uploaded 26 December 2025

***Why Man Creates,*** **Saul Bass, 1968**

Ten years ago, in 2015, I published Saul Bass: Anatomy of Film Design, a University of Kentucky Press book, a French edition arriving seven years later. Not many people know that George Lucas worked for Saul and accompanied him to the 41st Academy Awards, where Bass won for Why Man Creates. Behind the scenes, there was turmoil.

**Dorothy Chandler Pavilion**. Photo by Bud Gray – © 1978 Bud Gray – Image courtesy mptvimages.com

The Forty-First Academy Awards ceremony took place on 14 April 1969 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, on what used to be Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles. It was the first Oscar ceremony to be broadcast worldwide and the first held at that location. As usual, it was a star-studded affair. Katharine Hepburn was nominated as best actress for the second year in a row, this time for The Lion in Winter, an award she would have to share with Barbra Streisand for Funny Girl—the only time there has been a tie in this category. Saul and Elaine Bass, too, were present at the awards ceremony, the designer nominated in the “best documentary short” category for Why Man Creates (1968). The couple rode to the Chandler in a rented limousine together with USC graduate student and Bass advisee George Lucas, who had been an assistant on the production. Lucas would never work for or with Bass again, but he gave strong public support to Quest (1983, Saul Bass). Bass’s competitors for the Academy Award were The House that Amanda Built (Fali Bilimoria), The Revolving Door (Lee R. Bobker), A Space to Grow (Thomas P. Kelly Jr.), and A Way out of the Wilderness (Dan E. Weisburd). Given his longtime work in the film industry, Bass was heavily favored to win.

**Saul Bass and Tony Curtis at the Academy Awards (frame from television footage of the event. Courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.**

**Offical Academy portrait w/ Oscar. Courtesy AMPAS.**

At the ceremony, Bass sat in an aisle seat at stage left, ten rows from the podium; Elaine was next to him in a light-colored chiffon dress. Actors Diahann Carroll and Tony Curtis read out the names of the nominees for best documentary and best short documentary, respectively. When Tony Curtis called out Bass’s name as the winner, he bounced up to the stage, despite the wooden cane that preceded his every step. Curtis handed the Oscar to Bass, who was wearing a traditional tuxedo, in contrast to Curtis’s mod outfit. Bass took the Oscar in his right hand while balancing his weight with his left hand on the cane. He bent over the microphone and, in an uncharacteristic moment of brevity, said, “Thank you, thank you very much.” Then he quickly walked offstage. No thanks to his staff, no thanks to his wife, certainly a co-creator, no thanks to the Academy. More importantly, Bass failed to mention Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical Corporation, the film’s sponsor and original producer, causing a mini-scandal to erupt at corporate headquarters. Did Bass just forget, due to nerves or under pressure, to keep his acceptance speech short? Or was it something else? We will probably never know. The oversight may not have been accidental, however, given the huge fights with Kaiser over the film’s final structure, laboratory costs, and even the title. Bass hated the title because he thought it promised more than he could deliver.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Bass deserved to win for what would be his greatest cinematic achievement, although his largely avant-garde work certainly challenged the Academy’s notions of genre. Indeed, the category “Best Documentary, Short Subjects” hardly describes Bass’s free-form essay, a hodgepodge of film notes that asks many more questions than it answers. And what makes it a documentary? The film includes several forms of animation and mostly staged sequences. Indeed, it is a modernist romp, at moments seemingly incoherent and yet also brilliant in its open-endedness; its fragmentation forces the viewer to engage in the construction of meaning, thus fulfilling the promise of every modernist work to make the audience an active participant. In addition to the Academy Award, Why Man Creates won numerous film festival and other awards, and was placed on the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2002, designating it a national treasure.

But the somewhat tortured production history of the film also points out the pitfalls of having a corporate sponsor for such a personal and highly idiosyncratic project. In Bass’s most cynical evaluation of the film, he admitted to a group of AT&T executives: “I think now that the most creative thing about the film was that I found a rationalization that enabled me to convince the client, to allow me to make the film.” Even if the film was not a direct advertisement for Kaiser, the company covered all the production costs, while corporate executives and Bass often had vastly different ideas about what kind of film they were financing. Bass never wanted to answer the question the title asks; it was antithetical to his work methods, but the sponsors were looking for easy answers that could be sold in the education market. The designer usually argued that because sponsored films didn’t have to sell anything, they were preferable to commercials or industrial film productions, where the filmmaker was at the mercy of the client. But Bass wanted to have it both ways: complete freedom to produce artistic work, and complete financing by a corporate sponsor that would pay all the bills, including a substantial honorarium to support Bass’s office. Unlike most other avant-garde filmmakers, Bass was not willing to self-finance or to take on contract work to pay for his own personal films. After all, Bass had grown up in the Hollywood film industry, where no one invested their own money. Paradoxically, despite the insider status that an Academy Award seemingly represented, Bass remained an outsider in the movie industry.