Karel Kachyňa and The Holocaust: More Than Films for Children

Karel Kachya and The Holocaust: More Than Films for Children examines three Holocaust-themed works, Golden Eels (Zlat hoi, 1979), Death of a Beautiful Deer (Smrt krsnch srnc, 1986) and The Last Butterfly (Posledn motl, 1991), by Czech filmmaker Karel Kachya during the normalisation period of the Czechoslovak communist era.This work seeks to challenge the critical reception of Kachya's normalisation era (1970)(1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989) works, where a focus on his use of children's narratives and crude humour during the period has had a diminishing effect.Engaging with legitimate concerns over Kachya's ability to continue to work following the Warsaw Pact invasion of 1968 in Czechoslovakia when many of his New Wave contemporaries like Ji Menzel and Vra Chytilov were banned and some like Milo Forman felt compelled to emigrate, this work explores how Kachya's Holocaust-themed works address the filmmaker's attempts to produce a humanist poetics in the face of a dehumanising authoritarian regime, despite essentially working for the communist regime he was attempting to criticise.In generating analogies between the Nazi regime and his contemporaneous experience under communism, Kachya provides a powerfully subversive body of work which this article argues is deserving of greater attention in scholarship.Born in 1924, just six years after the creation of the state of Czechoslovakia following the First World War, Czech filmmaker Karel Kachya lived through the Nazi occupation of his country from 1939-1945, completed his studies in film during the communist revolution of 1948, worked during the New Wave era (ca.1963-1968) and the Prague Spring of 1968, and then the Soviet-led invasion that followed.Kachya continued to work during the ensuing normalisation years in the 1970s and 1980s, when the authorities sought to bring culture back in line with pre-1960s conformity with the regime (Blaejovsk 2004, 68), and into the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and beyond.As one of the pioneering filmmakers emerging from the newly created film school at Charles University, FAMU (Filmov a televizn fakulta Akademie mzickch umn v Praze, founded in Prague in 1946), Kachya's was a career that spanned over five decades.His vast body of work is punctuated by pivotal historical moments during the communist era in Czechoslovakia, and his films not only reflect this fluctuating epoch, but they also act as a document of a point in history.