From Prague to Łódź and back again: the Czech scriptwriter Pavel Hajný and Czechoslovak–Polish cultural transfer in the 1970s and 1980s

Abstract

Abstract From the mid-1970s to the end of the state-socialist regimes in Central Europe in 1989, the Czech scriptwriter and dramaturg Pavel Hajný successfully fostered parallel careers in two national film industries: between 1975 and 1989, Hajný was personally involved in, or indirectly participated on 11 strictly Polish projects or Czechoslovak–Polish co-productions. The theoretical and terminological framework of the analysis is borrowed from William H. Sewell Jr.’s concept of agency as an effective control over cultural schemas. The article examines the way Hajný used his resources when facing the schemas established in the Polish production culture. The authors claim that the effectiveness of Pavel Hajný as an agent travelling successfully between the Czech and the Polish film industries resulted from two essential factors: the compatibility of his knowledge as a scriptwriter and dramaturg with the demands of the Polish units, and the flexible adaptation of his skills to the schemas he was confronted with in the Polish production culture. It was his attitude, which focused on the fluent transfer of compatible norms rather than on changing the schemas, that helped him to establish a position as a sought-after craftsman. His career, not being a model of transnational fluidity, is exemplary of a strategy intentionally designed for crossing between two production cultures that were structurally compatible, but that evinced discrepancies in ideological, aesthetical, and professional norms.