Abstract
This chapter approached Czechoslovak film parody from the perspective of historical production studies. From the late 1920s to the present day, comedy has represented the most pervasive and enduring generic component of that nation's cinema, transcending Nazi occupation, World War II, the nationalization of the domestic film industry, and various forms of State-socialism.
By contrast, other popular genres either were not produced at all or were made in low numbers for short periods of time, as was the case with sci-fi films. Indeed, even the period's other prominent genre, the fairy tale, tended to be characterized by comedic modes as well.
Parody served as a substitute for absent genres and generated a canon in its own right, one that permitted careers, styles and cycles of films to develop from the 1960s to the early 1980s. Parody proved itself to be one of the most visible sites of 'soft resistanceʼ by a production culture that often tried to preserve its genre-based tastes and values in the face of political pressures.
To examine the political, cultural and industrial conditions that framed the Czechoslovak parodies after 1945, this chapter opens with an overview of parody's place within the various comedy traditions that characterized Czechoslovak cinema from the 1920s to today. The second section draws on the concept of group-based creativity and authorship that characterized the Czechoslovak State-socialist system of production after a reorganization of film development and production took place in 1955.
The chapter's third section focuses on "Lemonade Joe or the Horse Opera" (Limonádový Joe aneb Koňská opera, 1964) both in order to explain that the revival of popular genre filmmaking was facilitated by this new kind of collaborative, group-based creative practice and to show how the film's parodic techniques exemplify a tendency toward the 'autonomizationʼ of a parody canon. The chapter's final section proposes that Czechoslovak parody occupied a quite distinctive historical position.
With the texts and traditions that they mocked largely absent from the public sphere, these parodies turned inwards, referring to other parodies (rather than to concrete examples of non-parody target genres) as constituting a distinct production trend in the Czechoslovak cinema. Parody production thus created a canon of its own - in a process that was driven by production trends and film cycles.