Introduction: The ‘Forman’ Style Beyond Forman
In the 1960s director Miloš Forman achieved wide international renown for films like Loves of a Blonde (Lásky jedné plavovlásky, 1965) and The Firemen’s Ball (Hoří, má panenko, 1967), films noted for their use of non-professional actors, devotion to the comedy and pathos of everyday life, and adoption of a striking, verité-like authenticity that belies preliminary scripting and careful control. The lauded aesthetic of the so-called ‘Forman school’ was actually the creation of three film artists: Forman himself, Ivan Passer and Jaroslav Papoušek. Forman made no secret of the integral role of his two collaborators and close friends, who served variously as co-writers, assistant directors and all-round creative associates on his Czech films. It was also Papoušek’s novella Black Peter (Černý Petr) that had provided the source material for Forman’s first real feature film and initiated the two men’s collaboration. By the late 1960s both Passer and Papoušek had embarked on their own directorial careers, offering personal variations on the same fundamental style.
Jaroslav Papoušek (1929-1995) remains the least-known of the three talents. No doubt this is in part because, unlike Forman and Passer, he did not emigrate to America, continuing his career in the Czechoslovakia to which he felt too closely bound to leave. He was hardly a prolific filmmaker, amassing a mere nine directorial credits, most of which he would later disown. Though he produced films sporadically throughout the 1970s, the highly restrictive and meddlesome environment of Czechoslovakia’s normalisation-era film industry – together with health concerns – compelled Papoušek to abandon filmmaking for the freer creative sphere of painting – one of his original passions. He would make only a brief return to film with two features released in 1984 and a sole venture into television as co-writer and co-director of the series Slow Arrows (Pomalé šípy, 1993). However, before Papoušek abandoned the film camera for ‘palette, paintbrush and canvas’, he had assured his place in Czech culture with a trilogy of films about an enduringly, even nationally defining set of characters – the tight-knit but endlessly fractious Homolka family.[1]
Made between 1969 and 1972, the Homolka series is one of the brightest developments in the troubled Czechoslovak cinema that followed the country’s 1968 invasion. Straddling the final gasps of 1960s liberalism and the beginnings of repressive ‘normalisation’ in the 1970s, the trilogy in total is as close as we will find to a transitional point between two different eras and modes of cinema. While recognisably ‘New Wave’ in style, at least in the first two films, the series also anticipates popular trends in Czech cinema in the 1970s and ‘80s. Furthermore, while these films continue with themes and milieux familiar from the 1960s (not least the Forman school itself), the family’s exploits are also a telling statement on the notoriously ‘atomised’ society fostered by the post-invasion regime of Gustáv Husák.
Keeping Up with the Homolkas: The Trilogy’s Development
Papoušek’s first feature was The Most Beautiful Age (Nejkrásnější věk, 1968), a wry, subtly melancholy story of a sculpture class and its various models, each representing a different stage of life and enabling Papoušek a characteristic study of the respective benefits of youth, middle and old age. This loosely structured, extremely low-key work made little impact on its release – something that cannot be said of Papoušek’s second feature Behold Homolka (Ecce homo Homolka, 1969). Papoušek made and completed the film in 1969, after the Soviet-led invasion but just before the consequent, politically impelled reorganisation of the Czechoslovak film industry. Thus he could take still advantage of the decentralised system of near-autonomous filmmaking groups that would die out with 1960s reformism. In this concrete sense, the first Homolka film clearly belongs to the liberal, New Wave era. Continuities with the Forman school specifically can be found in the involvement of dramaturge Václav Šašek, who had worked on all Forman’s 1960s films and had cowritten Passer’s first feature Intimate Lighting (Intimní osvětlení, 1965) with Passer and Papoušek. In the cast Papoušek included Forman school regular Josef Šebánek (who had also appeared in The Most Beautiful Age) and even Forman’s twin sons Matěj and Petr as the Homolka children.
In what could almost be considered a telling, fateful act of misdirection, the film begins with a teenaged couple lying together in a forest clearing, characters who could easily have been the protagonists of a New Wave film. The couple’s attempt to make love is disturbed by the sound of other people, and our attention soon shifts to the source of the unwelcome noise – the Homolka family, a permanent extended unit of grandparents, adult son and daughter-in-law and young twin grandsons. The family anticipate a blissful bucolic Sunday in the woods accompanied by sausages and river-chilled beer, but an escalating chorus of cries for help – whose source and reason we never find out – forces the Homolkas to flee in panic with their fellow picnickers. Back in their small apartment, the family endures a series of feuds, mishaps and frustrations, starting with son Ludva’s desire to go and watch football rather than joining his wife and children for an outing at the races. ‘Climaxing’ in long-held regrets, tears and a quasi-conciliatory dance to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ on the radio, the film’s story is minimal even by Forman school standards.
Familiar from the school’s earlier entries is the film’s preoccupation with domestic strife and its ignoble, unglamorous yet engaging and physically striking character types: Josef Šebánek’s Děda (‘gramps’) is the image of ageing male sloth, vest-clad and with paunch permanently on display, though also given to high-energy tirades of righteous hectoring; Marie Motlová, as Babi (‘granny’), is a squat but formidable matriarch, more commanding and assured in her harangues than her husband, though likely to be smothering and indulgent with her son; gangling Ludva, played by František Husák, is a morose, constrained figure usually seen glowering in passive exasperation and defeat; while Ludva’s wife Heduš, played by Helena Růžičková, is easily a match for her in-laws and as forceful a presence, a large woman whose thwarted dreams of ballet dancing are still evident in a surprising grace. Šebánek was the only real non-professional actor among the main cast (and even he had appeared in three films by this point), but Papoušek retains the familiar sense of observed, unhurried reality, the same deceptively spontaneous textures of dialogue and performance.
The film differs from Forman’s own films in its more obviously controlled, more stylised visual approach. In his Film a doba review, Jan Kučera notes Papoušek’s more frequent shot changes and his tendency to shoot his actors in even lighting, without shadows, against shallow, confined backgrounds. Such techniques, Kučera points out, create a sense of ‘artifice’, of directorial manipulation, as though the characters were ‘puppets’ or specimens on an examining table.[2] Distinctive too is the film’s more overt and significant use of visual motifs – notably the crucifix that hangs on the Homolkas’ kitchen wall, which is used both to introduce the scenes set in the family’s home and as the film’s closing shot. This icon seems to signify the ‘sanctity’ of home for this insular clan – an equation of family with religion made overt by the naively personalised religiosity of Babi, who at one point talks directly to her picture of the Virgin Mary, clearly empathising with this other mother’s plight. The fact that the cross hangs crookedly also signals that this is a decidedly imperfect state of sanctity. The film’s verbal dimension is no less striking than its visuals. If Forman’s films make play with the platitudes and sanctimonies of older characters, Papoušek translates these into a near-absurd language of cliché and repetition: Děda in particular abounds with such tautologies as ‘Home is home’ and secondhand dictums like ‘Nature is a temple’. Kučera writes that such terms as ‘temple’ (chrám) function in the family’s discourse as ‘vague, sometimes nearly empty’ expressions that nonetheless ‘have the authority of fetishes’.[3]
This wryly absurd if still sympathetic portrait of an unexceptional Czech family clearly resonated with national audiences. The film was highly successful commercially as well as critically, and quickly gave rise to a sequel, Hoity Toity Homolka (Hogo fogo Homolka, 1970). This second film in the trilogy sustained the family’s popularity and perceived significance: a Filmový přehled reviewer wrote at the time of the film’s release that ‘the name Homolka is slowly becoming the same kind of representative of the Czech bourgeoisie that [Ignát] Herrmann’s Father Kondelík was in the last century’.[4]
The slang term ‘hogo fogo’ refers to conspicuous consumers or the ostentatiously wealthy. Here the term alludes to the Homolkas’ newfound status and mobility as proud owners of a new car. The family is first seen sightseeing in Prague, but their plans for further tourist fun are disrupted by a begrudging visit to the south Bohemian countryside to see Babi’s elderly father, supposedly at death’s door. The family’s usual squabbles and misadventures alternate with separate scenes of the wayward and surprisingly vigorous great-grandfather (whom they never get to see), as he enjoys the rough, traditional pursuits of rural life, including blood sports. Finally, the urban Homolkas too get to enjoy a natural communion as well as a rare moment of tranquility, as they bathe naked in a woodside lake. A belated fulfillment of the natural idyll the characters were denied in the first film, this is an upbeat and redemptive coda, a kind of familial rebirth to set beside the just-prior occurrence of the great-grandfather’s unobserved death.
Apparently averse to the idea of making sequels, Papoušek departed considerably from the visual style of the first film, adopting a widescreen format and now using only long or medium long shots. The quiet life of the village is conveyed in wide, contemplative images of streets and landscapes in which human figures are dwarfed or sometimes absent entirely. This new style is like an alternative inflection of Papoušek’s examining, ‘scientific’ gaze, with human specimens studied as elements of larger social and natural formations. The film’s non-anthropomorphic imagery could also be considered a reproof to the Homolkas’ self-centredness. In any case the film’s distinctive camerawork remains of a piece with the New Wave and its embrace of original or unconventional cinematic styles.
The family more properly realize their tourist ambitions in the trilogy’s final entry, Homolka and Pocketbook (Homolka a tobolka, 1972). In a portrait of communist-era, state-supported holidaymaking, the Homolkas enjoy a winter vacation at a recreational resort in the snowy mountains of Krkonoše. Higher-budgeted than the previous films, it is the only one in colour and involves a much wider range of characters. The film’s narrative focus, such as it is, concerns the attempt of two jointly vacationing couples to exchange room bookings with the Homolkas, which succeeds only by an appeal to the family’s greed. Other strands involve the resort’s newly appointed culture officer – an unkempt, retiring young man who makes eccentric art objects – and the resort manager’s son, a junior skiing enthusiast. As Jan Bernard comments, Homolka and Pocketbook has too many parallel story threads and most of them seem extraneous and insufficiently developed.[5] The film also indulges a physical comedy that was present but kept in check in the earlier films, subordinated to the overall sense of frustration, the air of Sisyphean futility, that hangs over the family’s endeavours. Here the pratfalls and farcical events are more a source of humour in themselves. In consequence, less time is given to the dynamics of the Homolkas’ own relationships, although there is one pleasing interlude – a throwback to the warmth and roundedness of the first two films – in which Ludva and Heduš enjoy an afternoon of tender physical intimacy.
This third installment proved successful, though less so than the first two films, and has generally been considered, including by Papoušek himself, the weakest film of the trilogy. Jan Jaroš has argued that it lacks the ‘satirical focus’ of the first two, and elsewhere it has been considered ‘superficial’ and unworthy of the ‘darkly sarcastic’ character of Papoušek’s earlier work.[6] This perceived decline in quality has been attributed to the entrenchment of normalisation politics into film production by 1972, which brought about the end of the ‘creative groups’ system, an institutional separation of dramaturgy and production and a great deal of ideologically-motivated interference. It is perhaps no coincidence that Homolka and Pocketbook is stylistically more pedestrian than its predecessors and that, as Václav Šašek notes, it marks Papoušek’s definitive break with ‘Formanesque poetics’.[7]
The Atomised Age: Images of Normalisation
As noted, the transformative force of normalisation only affected the actual production of the last Homolka film. At the level of content, however, the films now look like a strikingly accurate reflection of the mentality that Husák’s government was beginning to foster within Czechoslovak society. Of course, this is not how the films were received within the boundaries of published opinion at the time. In a 1974 overview of contemporary Czechoslovak cinema from Film a doba, Jiří Hrbas describes the first Homolka film sympathetically as a ‘satire on the bourgeoisie and petit-bourgeoisie’ – those relics ‘of past times’ who live on ‘in new forms and manifestations’. Hrbas is troubled only by the risk that such satirical treatments of bourgeois foibles might slip over into ‘glorification’.[8] More contemporary observers, however, have suggested that the Homolkas’ attitudes seem less a ‘relic of past times’ than a feature of the present and immediate future.[9]
Despite representing a return to hard-line Party control after the liberal experiment of the 1960s, normalisation policy notably departed from the fervent, activist rhetoric of 1950s communism: the new regime no longer wanted its citizens ‘to be politically active, only politically compliant’.[10] The tone of the normalisation era was set in the immediate post-invasion period when Czechoslovakia’s leaders appealed to its citizens for ‘calm, order and quiet’, themes that Gustáv Husák ‘continued to sound’ upon being appointed Communist Party First Secretary in April 1969.[11] The ‘quiet life’ was both a promise and a prescription of the new regime. The ‘communist citizen’ who was considered least threatening, most likely ‘to conform to…the “quiet life”’, was the one who sought satisfaction and self-definition ‘within the contours of his private life’ and not in the public sphere.[12] The goal of Husák’s regime was thus a ‘private, atomized citizenry’, with the principle of public engagement ‘cast out’ in favour of a society of ‘simultaneously lived private worlds’.[13] Symptomatic of this era was the increased – and officially sanctioned – importance of private leisure time, as typified in the ‘weekend getaway’ to one’s ‘chata’ or country cottage.
The Homolkas prove emblematic of normalisation and its ‘getaway’ mentality, not least because all three films involve the family’s attempts – sometimes successful, sometimes not – to enjoy a leisurely, peaceful trip or retreat. Perhaps the most significant and revealing ‘retreat’ of all, though, is the family’s panicked flight from the woods upon hearing the mysterious cries for help in Behold Homolka. Probably the most biting and darkly humorous passage in the entire trilogy, this is a literal enactment of the normalisation era in its collective flight from public responsibility, signalling this representative family’s inability to concern itself with those beyond its sealed-off unit, its refusal to acknowledge wider social bonds or to risk troubling its own quiet life (it is for ‘peace and quiet’, Děda asserts, that the family have come to the woods). Making the satirical resonance still more pointed is the fact that the Homolkas do not flee alone from the cries, but join an exodus of fellow day-trippers – including the young couple seen in the opening sequence. This is a mocking vision of a ‘community’ of citizens acting in parallel but self-interestedly – normalisation’s ‘simultaneously lived private worlds’ – and a vision that does not exclude the younger generation from its satirical lash. By thus situating the family’s behaviour Papoušek counters the suggestion that the family’s moral failure is in any way socially aberrant or merely representative of unreconstructed bourgeois ‘relics’.
The films seem further to illustrate the atomised mentality of normalisation through the hermetic insularity of their narratives. It is only in the last film, Homolka and Pocketbook, that the family really engages with anyone outside its own sphere. In the first film its sole encounter with an unrelated character is a couple of visits from a resident of the same apartment block, come to complain about the impingement of the family’s antics. The unwelcome interaction only confirms the universal desire for undisturbed peace and quiet. Papoušek also suspends the family in an eternal state of leisure, emphasising its atomised state further by refusing to show any of the family members engaged in the public, social endeavour that is work, and withholding even basic information about their jobs or working status. Admittedly the family’s insularity can be seen to reflect not only a culture shaped by the specifically political aims of normalisation, but also the increased status given to family life in 1970s Czechoslovakia. Kateřina Lišková observes how, in the domestic sexological discourse of the period, ‘[m]arriage and family become the model for relationships’, a view encapsulated in the maxim ‘family is the basis of the state’.[14] This same slogan will be parroted by Děda and Babi at the end of Behold Homolka, in another of the film’s absurd linguistic turns that only foregrounds the gulf between the received wisdom and this most unideal of families. Lišková argues that the 1970s’ privileging of the family, as formalised in various state benefits, had its roots in the policies of the 1960s, but it is clear how this attitude would have suited normalisation’s call to retreat into the private comforts of home.[15]
Of course, just as the Homolkas are no model family, so they fail to find the promised peace and fulfillment in an idealised private life. Indeed the routine flareups of family life necessitate their own retreats, as the quiet life proves something that must be wrested from the domestic battleground. Intervening in the first film’s central conflict – between Ludva’s desire to watch the football and serving his familial duty of going to the races – Děda heatedly counsels his son to stand his ground but then denies all complicity in Ludva’s wish for the sake of ‘peace and quiet’. This betrayal of the hapless Ludva stands as a modest forerunner of the lack of moral backbone that was to prove characteristic of 1970s Czechoslovakia.
Another core value of normalisation culture, besides the appeal of ‘the quiet life’, was consumerism. From the outset Husák’s government embraced the provision of consumer goods as a means of assuring citizens’ political acquiescence. In one account cited by Paulina Bren, Husák concluded in 1969 ‘that once people “have their creature comforts, they won’t want to lose them.”’.[16] To this end the regime introduced a ‘permanent price freeze on all basic food stuffs and fuels’, followed by price cuts ‘on a broad range of consumer goods’. Living standards rose throughout the early 1970s, and Bren notes that ‘private consumption on the whole went up by 36.5 percent’ between 1970 and 1978.[17] Items that were ‘previously considered luxuries’ could now be attained by a larger number, including the private automobile – that signifier of easier travel and atomised existence that a delighted Homolka family acquires in Hoity Toity Homolka.[18]
Jan Bernard reveals consumption as a crucial underlying motif of Behold Homolka, albeit one in which the desire to consume is repeatedly frustrated (Bernard considers this an act of narrative punishment for the family’s act of moral weakness in the forest). First the family are unable to enjoy their woodland picnic, and Děda must content himself with warm beer at home; Děda and Ludva prove farcically unable to retrieve a discard pack of cigarettes; and Babi burns the steaks she is cooking for dinner. Yet the most significant failure of consumption here, in the term’s broader sense, is the breakdown of the family’s television set. For – as Děda explicitly notes towards the end of the film – had the Homolkas been able to watch TV, none of their domestic feuds and upsets would have happened. Thus central to the film’s narrative by its very absence, the television is a resonant object in this context, perhaps one of the supreme symbols of normalisation culture in its triple identity as choice consumer comfort, passive and private entertainment medium and instrument of political control. Ewa Mazierska notes that ‘television had very bad connotations in Czechoslovak and Polish anti-communist discourse’, ‘condemned as a transmitter of lies’, and the fact that its absence here sows discord among the family points to the medium’s role as a means of public pacification.[19]
A similar comment on the pacifying, regulatory function of normalisation-era entertainment can perhaps be found in Homolka and Pocketbook, notwithstanding that this final film in the trilogy is generally considered itself a product of normalisation. The winter resort’s new culture officer Bedřich – who has first been made to get his scruffy long hair cut – is informed by his boss that it is essential to give guests ‘a real bit of entertainment’ (‘They have enough worries at home’). After a farcical fracas involving a fire extinguisher, one of the guests angrily informs Bedřich that his job is to ensure ‘that people here live decently and culturally’. Given that Bedřich is an artist compelled to take his current job for lack of money, it is tempting to see him as a self-deprecating portrait of Papoušek, himself a painter and sculptor, and as a reflection on the filmmaker’s uneasy position within a state film industry now oriented to uncritical, politically compliant entertainment.
Conclusion: The Homolkas and their Heirs
As noted, the Homolka trilogy looked back to the stylistic innovations of the New Wave and especially to the Forman School aesthetics that Papoušek had helped create. At the same time this series also looks like a template for much of the successful comedy cinema that followed in Czechoslovakia during the 1970s and ‘80s. One example of the latter is another trilogy, Zdeněk Troška’s very popular Sun, Hay… (Slunce, seno…)series made between 1983 and 1991. Boasting continuity with Papoušek’s series through the casting of Helena Růžičková, now ascended to the role of matriarch, these films also concern family relationships and the petty feuds of unglamourised everyday folk, although on a broader canvas and in a rural setting. That said, the cheerful crudity of Troška’s critically derided comedies also points up by contrast the human authenticity and artful minimalism of Papoušek’s films.
Together with the family-oriented, ensemble character of the Homolka series, the films’ satirical qualities were also reprised in later films. It could be suggested that the trilogy helped give rise to a vein of 1970s comedy concerned with satirising the foibles of the lower-middle class. At the subtler, wittier end of this trend are the comedies scripted by Zdeněk Svěrák and Ladislav Smoljak (the latter a friend of Papoušek’s who even has a small role in Homolka and Pocketbook). Svěrák and Smoljak’s attention to contemporary mores is epitomised in the 1976 Seclusion Near a Forest (Na samotě u lesa, directed by Jiří Menzel), a portrait of city-dwellers’ craze for their cosy bucolic retreats. At the broader end stand Petr Schulhoff’s farcical comedies of greed, one-upmanship and marital and neighbourly discord, such as We’ll Kick Up a Fuss Tomorrow, Darling (Zítra to roztočíme, drahoušku…!, 1976) and its sequel What I Have I Hold, Gentlemen (Co je doma, to se počítá, pánové…, 1980).
These films, especially Schulhoff’s, have been described as examples of ‘communal satire’, a variant of satire established in the 1950s as a form of officially acceptable comic critique. Communal satire benefitted the regime by taking aim not at the political or economic system as a whole but at partial, administrative insufficiencies within it or at the moral failings of its lower-level inhabitants, cast as remnants of lingering ‘petit-bourgeois’ tendencies.[20] In a close analysis of Schulhoff’s films, Martin Šrajer notes an implicit endorsement of the prevailing order in the suggestion that the protagonists’ lives would be contented were it not for their own avarice.[21] At the same time, Šrajer acknowledges, Schulhoff’s films are not without insight into society, with, say, his characters’ ‘petit-bourgeois’ acquisitiveness offering a ‘partial proof of the consumerist character of life under normalisation’.[22]
How different is the Homolka trilogy from communal satire? Papoušek’s films also deal with the foibles of ‘little people’, self-confined to their own private spheres and ruled by predominantly baser instincts. Homolka and Pocketbook specifically has been likened more than once to Schulhoff’s work, and that film ends on the same assertion of ignoble avarice as What I Have I Hold, Gentlemen…, with characters bent down scrabbling for money. Moreover, as we have seen, the Homolkas’ antics did prove amenable to readings as critiques of ‘bourgeois’ or ‘petit-bourgeois’ remnants. What perhaps distinguishes the Homolka trilogy is that – in its understated, seemingly apolitical way – it hits out more precisely at the specific culture of normalisation, most pointedly by stressing the characters’ desire for ‘the quiet life’ even at the expense of moral virtue. In addition, where some of these other films feature extreme and grotesque characters likely to satisfy their greed with fraudulent or even illegal activity, the Homolkas are ultimately unremarkable, respectably ordinary figures. They are harder to treat as social aberrations, easier to extend to an image of society that ‘incriminates’ everyone: to behold the Homolkas is to behold ourselves. This fidelity to the ordinary, in its relatable habits and strangely beguiling textures, is of course one way in which Papoušek continues the Forman School tradition of the 1960s, while reinforcing his critical portrait of the society of the 1970s.
Note: I wish to thank Petra Vlčková-Papoušková for kindly answering my questions about her father’s work while I was researching this piece.
Notes:
[1] ‘Jaroslav Papoušek’, Česká televize (https://www.ceskatelevize.cz/lide/jaroslav-papousek/)
[2] Jan Kučera, ‘Nazpět k ráji’, Film a doba, vol.16, no.4, 1970, p.198.
[3] Ibid., p.193.
[4] Unnamed reviewer, Filmový přehled, no.6, 5.2.1971, p.3.
[5] Jan Bernard, ‘Obraz lesa v českém filmu’, Filmový sborník historický 4 (Prague: Národní filmový archiv, 1993), p.77.
[6] Jan Jaroš, ‘Soutěžíme s českým filmem’, Týdeník Rozhlas, no.33, 31.7.2000 (http://www.radioservis-as.cz/archiv/3300/33tele2.htm); ; ‘Homolka a tobolka’, Filmový přehled, 2018 (https://www.filmovyprehled.cz/cs/film/396952/homolka-a-tobolka)
[7] Václav Šašek, ‘Rozhovory’, Homolka a tobolka (DVD release: Bonton/Centrum českého videa)
[8] Jiří Hrbas, ‘Československá kinematografie v sedmdesátých letech’, Film a doba, vol.20, no.7, 1974, p.370.
[9] See, for instance, Alena Prokopová, ‘Ecce homo Homolka’, Filmový přehled, 17.10.2016 (https://www.filmovyprehled.cz/cs/revue/detail/ecce-homo-homolka)
[10] Paulina Bren, ‘Weekend Getaways: The Chata, the Tramp, and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia’, in David Crowley and Susan E. Reid (eds), Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2002), p.126.
[11] Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism after the 1968 Prague Spring (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2010), p.89.
[12] Bren, ‘Weekend Getaways’, p.126.
[13] Ibid, p.131, p.127.
[14] Kateřina Lišková, Sexual Liberation, Socialist Style: Communist Czechoslovakia and the Science of Desire, 1945-1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p.186.
[15] Ibid., p.179.
[16] Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV, p.86.
[17] Ibid., p.87.
[18] Sharon L. Wolchik, Czechoslovakia in Transition: Politics, Economics and Society (London; New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991), p.37.
[19] Ewa Mazierska, Masculinities in Polish, Czech and Slovak Cinema: Black Peters and Men of Marble (Oxford; New York: Berghahn, 2008), p.112.
[20] Martin Šrajer, ‘Obraz české společnosti v normalizačních komediích Petra Schulhoffa’ (Master’s thesis, Charles University, 2014), pp.54-55; Jan Parolek, ‘Oficiální satira jako obraz doby: Dikobraz v letech 1968-1970’ (Bachelor’s thesis, Charles University, 2016), p.18; Alena Veselá, ‘Padesátá léta 20. století v zrcadle české satiry: Obraz dvou let (1954 a 1955) v konferencích Svazu československých spisovatelů’ (Bachelor’s thesis, University of South Bohemia, 2010), p.17.
[21] Šrajer, ‘Obraz české společnosti’, p.76-77.
[22] Ibid., p.115.
