Ithaca College

Rachel Schaff, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in Screen Studies, has published an essay entitled Classifying Czech Melodrama: Mrs. Morality Sweeps Through the Protectorate” in Studies in Eastern European Cinema.

The essay considers the Czech National Film Archive’s (Národní filmový archive/ NFA) retrospective classification of sixty-seven feature-length fiction films produced between 1930 and 1945 as generic melodramas in their volumes of Czech Feature Film. The focus is less on how the NFA defined the genre, than how these volumes, in bringing melodrama into critical view, reveal important assumptions about its cultural and historical affiliations with the Nazi occupation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, when films were necessarily co-produced with the Nazified film industry. Through a close reading and reception study of Saturday (Sobota, Václav Wasserman, 1945) this essay considers how the perception of melodrama films as light entertainment during the Nazi occupation provided yet another opportunity for these films on Czechoslovak state television during the post-1968 period of normalization. 

The essay can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/2040350X.2020.1792077