Articulating the free market

The period of the 1990s in the formerly communist countries of East-Central Europe has been studied from the point of view of economic, political, and social changes, but relatively little attention has been paid to culture, and cultural production in particular. Yet the radical changes that the economy underwent after the collapse of communism brought about not only new forms of political and social behaviours, they also affected the cultural sector, both on an institutional level and in terms of what could be represented. This project looks at the cultural responses to the systemic transformations in Poland, Czech Republic, and Slovakia after 1989 through the prism of films and television series.

Principal Investigator: Veronika Pehe, Marie-Sklodowska Curie Fellow, Institute for Contemporary History, Czech Academy of Sciences, 2018-2022.

Still from The Inheritance (Dědictví, aneb kurvahošigutntag, dir. Věra Chytilová, 1992)