Authors

Discussion

This paper’s starting premise is that popular culture – alongside the media and the discourse of politicians and other key transformation actors – contributed to the structuring of the economic imagination of Central European populations in the 1990s. Specifically, it examines the case of cinema in the Czech Republic and Poland – neighbouring countries with comparable transformation experiences overall – which, however, took differing approaches to restructuring their film industries. 

Using an analysis of the discourse of filmmakers vis-à-vis the economic changes in the film industry and a consideration of how this discourse differed across generational cohorts, this paper traces how filmmakers responded to the new prominence of commercial cinema and their often-perceived loss of prestige and status of ‘autonomous artists’. It shows how both the creative outputs and the ancillary discourse of filmmakers illustrate the changing values attached to the free market and to the purpose of cultural production in a market economy during transformation. The paper will argue that while filmmakers across generations supported the liberalization of the economy in general, they formulated diverse, largely moral arguments for exempting cinema from a purely market-based logic. The field of cinema thus allows us to reconstruct some of the contradictory thinking about cultural transformation and economic change in the 1990s.