How the army became a “workshop” for cinema during communism

František Vláčil, Karel Kachyňa, Vojtěch Jasný, Jiří Menzel and
several more of the greatest ever Czech film directors honed their craft in
the army during the communist period. And as the Czechoslovak New Wave was
blossoming, the country’s military were producing the kind of short films
that were the envy of their counterparts elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc.
That’s according to historian Alice Lovejoy, author of the book Army Film
and the Avant Garde. We spoke when Lovejoy, who teaches at the University
of Minnesota, was in Prague recently.