The colours of socialism: visual nostalgia and retro aesthetics in Czech film and television

Abstract

Since the end of the 1990s, post-socialist nostalgia has been a powerful trend in Czech film and television. This article focuses on the examples of Filip Renč’s 2001 musical comedy Rebelové (The Rebels) and the Czech television series Vyprávěj (Tell Me a Story, 2009–2013), which both portray the period around the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. Through an analysis of the visual style of the film and television series, as well as a discussion of the way the texts recontextualize the popular culture of the period they portray, the article proposes that Czech post-socialist nostalgia is more fruitfully viewed as “retro”, which is here differentiated from non-nostalgic depictions of socialism through a comparison with the mini-series Hořící keř (Burning Bush, directed by Agnieszka Holland, 2013). Although retro’s concern with surface and style can be interpreted as apolitical, the author argues that the political agenda of Czech retro texts needs to be understood by the ways they combine a fetishization of the aesthetic trappings of the period with a condemnation of the political system of the time.