Silence under the Linden Tree: Rural Cinema-Going in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This study examines how the consumption of media was transformed (primarily cinema-going and television watching) in rural Czechoslovakia in the 1950s and 1960s. Period reports of the audience and public thought, interviews with contemporaries, and analyses of period programmes indicate that the processes of collectivization of agriculture, industrialization of the countryside, and modernization of villages were from numerous perspectives contradictory tendencies that nonetheless influenced the consumption of media and culture in a complementary manner. The reasons for resistance towards the cinema, reflected in gradually decreasing attendance even though the audience continually perceived film as one of the most popular occupations of their free time, are here explained in the wider context of social, demographic, and geographic changes of post-war rural Czechoslovakia and in association with rapid and massive acceptance of television by the rural population.