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THE EUROPEAN CINEMA
was almost wholly taken over by the Nazis and the huge studios at Barrandov, begun before the war, were completed by them. Equipment and technicians were imported from Germany, and Nazi film production was for a while centred in Prague. (Pabst made his Paracelsus film at Barrandov.) When the Liberation came, the Czechs were left with probably the best-equipped studio in Europe and an immense national enthusiasm for film-making. A few of their technicians had worked in Britain during the war, which had possibly some small influence on the technical development of their work on their return. With more studio-space than they could use themselves, the Czechs leased space in 1945 and 1946 to the Russians, and among the films made there was The Stone Flower (1946), a fairytale legend of heavy beauty shot in Agfacolor, with astonishingly clever trickwork. Of Czechoslovak post-war production, the most successful films have been those dealing with roughly contemporary themes, which only naturally for a while meant stories of the Resistance and Czech-German relationships at the time of Munich. Men Without Wings, by Frantisek Cap, The Warning by Martin Fric, The Strike by Stekly and Stolen Frontier by Jiri Weiss were all well-made technically and showed a remarkable advance on anything made in Czechoslovakia before the war. In their large-scale historical reconstruction films, such as Warriors of Faith, by Vladimir Borsky, they are less successful and tend towards a theatricalism which seems imitative of outside influences.
Since the war, great activity has taken place among the Czech documentary makers, now grouped together under Kratky Film which is the branch of the State Film Industry looking after short films. Like the Danes and the Poles, the Czech documentary makers tend sometimes to overmuch impressionism, but they have a poetic quality in their approach that is impressive. Kratky Film, under the producership of Eugen Klos, have ambitious production plans which, if carried out, will make Czechoslovak documentary important in Europe. Their distribution in
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