City, Country, Forest
Spatial Imagery in Czech Film at the Turn of the Century
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The village film or the village comedy are defining genres of Czech film. It presents rural seclusion and the idyllic village community as a counter-model to the town. The contrast of town and country picks up a theme that was already popu-lar in 19th-century literature. Since the early 2000s in particular, a “return of the rural” has been observed in Czech film and in Czech prose. However, traditional contrasting motifs such as pub and café, town and country, village and forest are being displaced. Village and city are blending into a civilizational context. The counter-image is the undomesticated forest, on the one hand, and a quasi-colonially interpreted alien nature in the form of the Slovak mountains, on the other. This shift is at the same time an expression of growing tensions in society.
(Osteuropa 4-6/2021, pp. 65–90)